Welcome to a new issue of the Journal of Runic Studies, the premier Malkioni publication for studies into the nature of Glorantha. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please consult with the spirit bound to the appropriate electronic page.
The book that some of us at ChaosiumCon were lucky enough to get is finally out to the general public! The full title is “Chaosium Archival Collection – Volume 1: The Stafford House Campaign“, but don’t get your hopes up about this ominous “Volume 1” bit… as far as I can tell, this is “just in case” they stumble upon more interesting stuff in their archives. It’s likely that there won’t be a second volume for years, or ever.
Anyway, this 84 pages book contains articles written by Greg Stafford between 1978 and 1981, in the very early days of RuneQuest and Glorantha.
Be transported in time to the earliest days of tabletop roleplaying games with the first volume of Chaosium’s Archival collection: The Stafford House Campaign.
Greg Stafford’s RuneQuest house campaign has a kind of legendary status among fans of the game. Many of the original RuneQuest playtesters took part in it, which was hosted either at the Stafford home on Evelyn Avenue in Berkeley, or the first Chaosium office nearby.
These articles were published in early gamging fanzines (or, technically, APAs… Amateur Press Associations) like The Wild Hunt, but there’s also some exclusive material in the book, such as three articles named “The Pharaoh’s Gazette”, on Greg’s Holy Country games, and some scans of his player record sheets.
I’ve been slowly reading through the book over the summer, as I was waiting for the official release before publishing a review on this website… expect that review later this week or next week! The short version is: it’s obviously a very deep-cut of RPG history and Gloranthan lore, but it’s an absolutely fascinating look into Greg’s games, and the shaping of the Hero Wars meta-plot.
James Coquillat interviews Jeff Richard about RuneQuest’s homelands — those that are presented as character options in the rulebook. This is a good presentation for a new player, as Jeff gives the elevator pitch of each homeland with a little bit of flavour and excitement to make it come alive. There are also some recommendations at the end for picking which homeland is right for you.
Jonstown Compendium
The Jonstown Compendium is Chaosium’s community content program for all Gloranthan games, hosted on DriveThruRPG. Disclaimer: all the relevant links are affiliate links that hopefully will let us cover some of the hosting and maintenance costs for the website and podcast! Thanks for using them!
It includes nineteen NPCs that can provide interaction or story possibilities for RuneQuest or QuestWorlds games in Glorantha. Much of the material can also be converted to other systems or settings, so long as a half-abandoned frontier settlement might be in need of protection. It also provides a guide to the often-overlooked River Folk of the valley.
Jeff’s Notes
Jeff Richard, the current mastermind on everything Gloranthan at Chaosium, is often posting notes and thoughts on the RuneQuest Facebook group. Here’s our curated list from the past week. A partial archive of these sources is compiled on the Well of Daliath.
A heroquest is an exploration of Glorantha’s collective unconsciousness – the realm of mythology. In a heroquest, the questers interact directly with the primal forces and archetypes that make up the world. Their mundane skills and abilities are largely irrelevant here – this the realm of Runes and magic. Material limits do not apply here: things may change shape and size; rivers flow uphill; one can breathe beneath the sea and walk on the Sky; and the very landscape may change without warning.
This isn’t the first time Jeff uses the “collective unconscious” as a reference to heroquesting and the God Time. I guess it’s important. But yeah, we’ve discussed this a bit in the past but I think it is a lot more helpful to newbies to describe heroquesting as “adventuring into the world of myths” rather than all this “re-enactment of myths” business we got from the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Of course, it also opens up a bunch of problems: newbie gamemasters need to have the basic elements of Gloranthan mythology in order to be able to riff on it. Not everybody has read books on Aztec or Mesopotamian history to get the basics of what these “primal forces and archetypes” actually do (but most people might have some general idea of what storm and death and hunting gods do from Norse or Greek mythologies, given their prevalence in pop culture).
This is where the Runes can be useful: Storm deities get tamed by Earth deities, Light deities crush Darkness deities, and so on. That Runic wheel on the character sheet is useful to get the general idea, although it’s not explained as such — hopefully that explanation will go with the heroquesting rules when they’re published. By the way, if you have the Sourcebook or the Guide, you might be confused about this slightly different version of the wheel:
Don’t worry… it’s… complicated. You don’t have to care too much as long as you have some general rule of thumb for how various mythic entities act most of the time (but don’t forget to throw some curve balls every now and then).
The focus on archetypes is significant. When I run a hero quest, the characters encounter the mighty Storm King or Emperor Sun, the Adventurer, the Thunderer, the Sword Man, the Earth Mother, the Wolf, the Bear, the Blue Serpent, the Talking God, the Knowing God, the White Lady, and others. Let the players name them.
This is both good for curve balls (“you thought this Storm God was Orlanth? Nope! You failed your roll so it’s another angry forgotten Storm God from the southern lands of fire!”) and for not having to name-drop many gods from Glorantha lore, which also means not having to know too much in the first place. You just know you need a Water deity over there, you don’t have to care “who” it might be.
Upon their return, the heroquesters bring back both the boons and banes they have gained through their adventure. The banes are many; careless words might bind them as geases, and they might lose parts of their personality or even soul. But the boons are equally mighty – the ability to bring forth some of the magic of the God Time and manifest it in the Now.
I find that figuring out a good power level for boons and banes is tricky — trickier than figuring out the power level of, say, some magical artifact given as a gift by an NPC or found in some loot. I hope there will be some advice on that with either the heroquesting rules or in the general gamemaster guide sections. As for losing “parts of their personality or even soul”, I assume this points at rules in which your character can lose points in Passions or POW or even possibly CHA. Harsh! (but fair)
Heroquesters use myths as guides and navigational beacons, study lore to find paths through the realm of mythology. Yet this can be like trying to find your way through a dream. Only a fool thinks they can effortlessly walk in the paths of the gods. Even the best-known stories can hold surprises, and our every action changes the landscape, like the rotation of a kaleidoscope.
Here we may be back in the land of newbie confusion, I think. Using myths as guides requires knowing those myths upfront (that is: Gloranthan lore) or making them up (which still requires some Glorantha lore, or at least some familiarity with general mythic archetypes, as said previously). It might also require some good way to introduce these “best-known stories” without tedious lore dumps.
Lunar Imperial Finances
Those of you who love spreadsheets might love this: Lunar taxes!
The Red Emperor normally collects [up to 4.5 million Lunars] a year from various sources (rent, harvest taxes, tolls, tribute, etc). That’s roughly comparable to what Antiochus III had access to.
Antiochus III was a Hellenistic king in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE. He didn’t rule over ancient Greece proper though: he was in charge of the Seleucid Empire, the largest bit of Alexander’s old Macedonian Empire after it was broken up in pieces following his death. Here’s a map:
To maintain the Lunar Army at the wartime 1621 figures costs the Red Emperor [up to 4.2 million Lunars] a year. His cavalry costs about the same as the entire infantry, and the Lunar college of magic costs nearly half as much as the entire Cavalry Corps. Now that’s a wartime army – in peacetime it is probably [up to 3.3 million Lunars].
We had some military numbers from a previous note: 46000 infantry soldiers, about 20000 cavalry soldiers, a bit more than 7000 magicians, and about 4500 support troops. The vast majority of these people would have an average cost of living of 60L as per the RuneQuest rules, with a very small elite around 100 or 200L or more. That does indeed sum up to about 4.2 million Lunars.
There’s not a lot left to run the empire and, more importantly, for the Emperor to finance all his degenerate parties and stuff…
The Lunar Empire has been on a war footing since 1618, so those big rooms filled with gold wheels are now mostly empty, and the Red Emperor has been forced to do things like raise rents, create new taxes, loot temple treasuries, and all sorts of other measures – I mean nobody is going to expect Argenteus to cut down on the public largesse! The sieges of Whitewall and Nochet were absurdly expensive, and neither resulted in much plunder. Worse yet, the Pentans have disrupted the taxes in Oraya and First Blessed, and peasant rebellions (and the White Moon Movement) have troubled Karasal, Oronin, and even the Silver Satrapy! So revenues are way down, expenditures are up.
And then we get the Dragonrise and the defeat of the Lunar Army in the Redlands.
Jeff figures that the empire has been desperate to squeeze more taxes out of its Dragon Pass territories for however long they held them, and than these days maybe a bunch of Etyries (and possibly a few Issaries) merchants might start issuing IOUs to the government… more here.
Elsewhere on Arachne Solara’s Web
Not everything is about Glorantha, although most things are! Here are loosely relevant things that we found on the interwebs.
The Fortress of Azuer
The “Motilla de Azuer” is one of the several fortresses of middle Bronze Age Spain. It contains one of the oldest known wells in the Iberian Peninsula. It’s very likely that the people living there included farmers working the surrounding lands.
This might be a good reference for a small hill fort. And with its structure that scales up as you get to the centre, it’s begging for the player characters to try and take it!
For a 4000 year old text, the Epic of Gilgamesh is apparently surprisingly alive, at least in terms of finding new portions of it. World History has a few articles about how newly discovered tablets in varying preservation states can still bring new fragments of the story to light. This one on Tablet V is pretty interesting, as it mixes wartime looting, clandestine price negotiations, and mythical monkeys. The item (pictured above) was acquired in three broken pieces from smugglers by the Sulaymaniayh Museum in 2011, and it features about twenty extra verses about Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s adventures.
A Frog-Woman Ritual Gone Wrong
So there’s this recent discovery of a large frog graveyard in a mid-iron age archaeological site. The scientists have some super non-fun theories about the presence of 8000 frog bones there, but we all know that it’s probably some Frog-Woman fertility ritual gone wrong, right?
Thank you for reading
That’s it for this week! Please contact us with any feedback, question, or news item we’ve missed!
Welcome to a new issue of the Journal of Runic Studies, the premier Malkioni publication for studies into the nature of Glorantha. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please consult with the spirit bound to the appropriate electronic page.
Here is what us God Learners were up to this week.
Episode 16: Ernaldan Adventuresses: Blood, Sex, and Rock’n’Roll
Episode 16 is about playing Ernaldan cultists and other Earth pantheon initiates! We have Katrin Dirim and Claudia Loroff with us, who summarizes Ernaldan priestesses as “blood, sex, and rock’n’roll”. We discuss Ernalda’s role in Glorantha and in our games, how to play non-combative characters, what the best Earth magic is, orgies and pregnancies, and more! Plus: Gloranthan cooking!
Vale Gene Day, whose untimely passing was 40 years ago last week—in addition to being a rising star in comics, his art also left an indelible legacy upon many of Chaosium’s earliest board game and TTRPG releases (Nomad Gods, Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, Stormbringer and more).
Gene’s most iconic art pieces for Chaosium are probably for Call of Cthulhu:
The cover painting was commissioned for Call of Cthulhu in 1981, but the Cthulhu image on the right originally comes from Gene’s 1979 limited ed art book ‘All Things Dark and Dangerous’ (Shadow Press, Canada).
But for Gloranthaphiles, he also did a few timeless depictions of Prax, in Nomad Gods for instance. We talk a bit about Gene’s art, and other Praxian matters, in our two episodes (part 1 and part 2) on this venerable board game.
The Jonstown Compendium is Chaosium’s community content program for all Gloranthan games, hosted on DriveThruRPG. Disclaimer: all the relevant links are affiliate links that hopefully will let us cover some of the hosting and maintenance costs for the website and podcast! Thanks for using them!
Coming VERY soon, not one but TWO source books for the Hero Wars in the East Isles from Hannu Rytövuori, David Cake and Nils Weinander. Vol 1. Korolan Islands: History, Geography, Player Background, Occupations, Mysticism, Martial Arts, Islands Details and more! (~87 pages) Vol 2. Fires of Mingai: A starter campaign set in the East Isles with four, fully detailed scenarios. (~127 pages)
I love those covers!
Previewing the Pavis & Big Rubble Companion Remake
Ian Thomson has a PDF preview for us while he’s doing some finishing touches to his upcoming Jonstown Compendium book. For those who don’t know, this is the relaunch of some of his old Pavis & Big Rubble Companion materials.
Jeff’s Notes
Jeff Richard, the current mastermind on everything Gloranthan at Chaosium, is often posting notes and thoughts on the RuneQuest Facebook group. Here’s our curated list from the past week. A partial archive of these sources is compiled on the Well of Daliath.
The Wetlands of Lowland Peloria
Jeff shares some notes about the wetlands of lowland Peloria, which are located basically between Glamour and Alkoth. You can see the wetlands on this Argan Argar map in brown:
Unlike the Upland Marsh in Dragon Pass, these marshlands are densely populated. Other Pelorians refer to the inhabitants of these marshlands as Weeders. They build boats, huts, lodges, nets, and even clothing out of the reeds and rushes. They live off fishing, growing rice, and raising fowl and some other livestock.
Jeff uses a picture of the Arab marshes of Iraq for this. This is located in the wetlands near where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet — what used to be Mesopotamia in the Bronze Age. This is the suburbs of Uruk and other famous ancient cities, although I haven’t checked if there used to be wetlands back then too (climate and shorelines changed a lot in 4000 years!)
The Weeders largely worship their Heron Goddesses, the Oslira River, and their local Boat Boy, along with some other minor deities and spirits. Shargash is often worshiped as an associated deity. They have proven stubbornly resistant to Seven Mothers missionaries.
If you want a reference for Weeders, you could simply look at the people who live there today:
This, for example, is a Mashoof, the traditional long canoe used to navigate these waters. Here’s a video if you want more references. It’s got everything, from the boats to the reed huts and the herons!
Oslira
Since we’re on the shores of the Oslir river, Jeff writes about Oslira’s magic:
So I was recently pondering why Oslira does not provide Strongnet, unlike Engizi and Zola Fel. And I realized the answer is quite easy – the Oslira cult is not the cult of Weeders, who net fish.
[…]
Oslira’s cult is about keeping the river goddess happy (and within her embankments). It is far more agriculturally oriented than Zola Fel or Engizi. Fishing is often with spear by the River Priests, while with net by the Weeders.
I want to make an ironic quip here about RuneQuest and “sim-Glorantha” but I will refrain… oh, wait, I just did. Sorry. Anyway, the cool thing here is that Jeff points us to a 1950s photo of people spear-fishing in Iraq, and the spears are… not what you’d expect. Or not what I expected, at least. Here’s another picture with (as far as I can tell) more permissible licensing for sharing:
The spears look like long pitchforks with short spikes or something. Cool, eh?
By the way, if you want to know exactly what magic Oslira has, David Scott has you covered. And I like some of the discussion that followed, for instance about how Orlanth Thunderous is an associate cult of Oslira because its rains are the river’s source. David says:
Orlanth Thunderous is likely an associate of Oslira in the Grazelands, and Old Tarsh (where the rains fall at the headwaters), but as soon as it hits Tarsh, that’s likely it.
Some people asked why Heler isn’t the associate cult here, given that Heler is the actual rain god. Both David and Jeff replied, including this:
Heler is atmospheric water – Rain. He’s not the Cloud God – that’s Orlanth Thunderous. It is worth noting that Heler does not have Cloud Call (he gets that from Orlanth Thunderous). So he’s usually treated as an accoutrement of Orlanth, like Lightning, or the Sandals of Darkness, or the Mist Cloud. Orlanth is often depicted with a small blue god or goddess around him – the embodiment of Rain.
So you can consider that rain is one of Orlanth’s “cool stuff”, or you can personify this cool stuff into a separate deity. I vaguely remember a bunch of precedent for this, especially in Aztec and Mayan mythology, but I can’t find references at the moment. Anyway, if Orlanth’s rain can be turned into a spirit cult or even divine cult (depending on the place), Orlanth’s other cool stuff could also get the same treatment. Imagine the cult of the “dark sandals”, in which the main ceremonial activity is to relax in the shade? I’d sign up for lay membership.
The Drivers of the Hero Wars
Now we have another series of notes on everybody’s favourite Gloranthan meta-plot, the Hero Wars! (we had a similar series of notes a few months ago if I recall correctly). The four notes look at the first appearance of the “Gloranthan super-heroes” in the original board game White Bear & Red Moon.
Part 1 is about Glorantha’s Alexander, Argrath. Jeff mentions how Greg Stafford originally created a Second Age hero named Argat, which he later split in two by writing Arkat and Argrath into the setting:
Now it leaves everyone plenty of room to interpret – was Argrath a cynical but charismatic manipulator, was he a religious fanatic, was he a footloose adventuring rogue who found himself with great responsibilities, or was he seeking to redeem his ancestors and his people? Or maybe a bit of all of this? Your Argrath will vary, of course.
Regardless of our interpretation of Argrath the mundane individual, we know that he very much embodies Greg’s Hero Archetype for Glorantha, as Greg took his hero Argat (who defeated Gbaji and his empire in a Great War) and placed him in Dragon Pass to fight Gbaji-become-Red Goddess and her empire (Arkat and Gbaji get their own story a few years later with Cults of Terror).
There’s a bit more on Argrath here, which is very interesting: Greg designed the Orlanthi myths and customs around Argrath.
Let me just answer the underlying proposition – of course Argrath is a “good or at least acceptable Orlanthi hero”. He pretty much defines what an Orlanthi hero is. Remember, from a writer’s perspective, Greg created the Orlanthi around Argrath, not vice versa. Now we are all playing RQ in the Third Age as the Hero Wars are underway, so we don’t see things from that perspective, but that is how the Orlanthi were created as part of the setting – as the people Argrath comes out of and leads.
Greg created plenty of Orlanth’s myths to echo Argrath’s deeds – Orlanth and the Strange Gods, that parallels Argrath and his Praxian, Wolf Pirate, and draconic allies. The EWF was created as backstory behind the Hero Wars and the Dragontooth Runners. And the list goes on.
So with that in mind, it should not be surprising that Argrath manages to unify his people and lead them against the Lunar Empire, and was able to survive setbacks. He literally was created by Greg to be that hero for them! Now of course, there are people who distrust him, have rivalries with him, dispute his qualifications or competence – the same existed with Alexander of the Romances, Arthur, Achilles, and every other hero Greg was inspired by.
The other “drivers” of the Hero Wars are also presented as multi-faceted, with lots of room to interpretation in various games and game materials. Part 2 if about Harrek the Berserk:
Again, we have plenty of latitude for interpreting Harrek. Was he a murderous madman? A Conan-figure whose adventures bring him to the very heart of Glorantha’s mythology? Was he more of a Rustam figure who brought destruction often despite his best efforts?
I don’t think I have to explain who Conan is anymore than I need to explain Alexander, but Jeff gives other reference I didn’t know:
Rostam, a legendary hero from pre-Islamic Persian mythology. A quick search yields classic hero stuff: a holy warrior riding a fancy horse, going into dangerous and possibly inter-dimensional places inhabited by powerful demons, fighting his nemesis, killing his son without knowing who it was, and so on.
Bhima, one of the main figures in the famous Hindu epic family drama The Mahabharata. The story is roughly about the war between two groups of demi-god cousins, and he’s one of those. The Wikipedia page has a bunch of cool images that you could use to tweak your mental image of Harrek in unexpected ways.
In Part 3, the Red Emperor gets a bit of coverage — but a lot less than the previous two, probably because, I mean, it’s the Red Fucking Emperor, so being mysterious and distant is part of the vibe. Apart from his immediate entourage, I’m pretty sure nobody knows who he really is or even possibly what he looks like.
There are rumors that Moonson is little more than a figurehead, a walking icon that is the locus of Lunar worship, but actually all decisions and deeds are done by others. Other rumors suggest that each Moonson is an ambitious and remarkable figure capable of beating off rivals to gain and hold on the title. As with Argrath and Harrek, there is room for plenty of interpretations.
And again, there is plenty of room for interpretation here. Jar-eel could be cheerfully amoral and ruthless, with a veneer of wry wit and smiles. She could be effortlessly awesome, a moral and artistic paragon, destined to combat savagery. She could be all of that, while doubts gnaw within her about her role, and whether she does in fact serve Gbaji.
Sheng Seleris Through a Pentan Lens
Jeff attempts to go over Sheng Seleris’ history through a Pentan point of view, rather than the usual Lunar one. In the Lunar version, he’s the ruthless horse nomad that brought the empire to its knees. In the Pentan version, he’s the ruthless horse nomad that brought the empire to its knees and that’s a good thing.
Now I present this not to whitewash Sheng Seleris but to remind folk that even his tale is not so straightforward. Sheng Seleris represented all that which had been usurped by the Red Goddess and her dynasty – the Imperial Light of Yelm, the Golden Empire. It is easy to see that if Orlanth needed to resurrect Dead Yelm to restore the cosmos, then Argrath needed to resurrect dead Sheng Seleris to restore the world.
The God Learners’ Trickster Studies
If you look at the Guide to Glorantha, you might blink and miss the write-up for Thanor:
Thanor (ruin): In the Second Age, this city was the capital of Slontos. The notorious “Trickster College” was here, an important school of the God Learners. The ruins are now half-submerged and home to schools of fish and Ludoch.
This is one of the reasons I love the Guide. I skim over cool stuff all the time, and then when I skim the same pages a different way, I pick up different cool stuff. Anyway, Jeff spells it out more:
The God Learners were fascinated by the Trickster Archetype. They believed (quite correctly) that this archetype was powerful and a key driver of the events of the Godtime. Eurmal was the most fully-fleshed out Trickster cult, but there were so many others. Raven, Rakenveg, Firebringer, Bolongo, Ratslaff, and more. Members of one cult could use magic from another, and so on. Another theory was that Arkat-Nysalor might be somehow connected to this.
And so the God Learners gathered everything they could and made a veritable Clown College in Thanor. Great insights and discoveries were made – and at its height, the seas came in and Thanor was submerged. Everything figures that was just another one of Eurmal’s jokes – a thank you for bringing all of his parts together in one place.
Given that I have an Eurmali player in my game, I suddenly have various crazy ideas for western travels…
A note about Beat-Pot Aelwrin, Jar-eel’s lover or pet project or sidekick or whatever you think is cooler. I don’t know yet what to do with this guy, frankly, so he’s still in my pile of stuff to figure out later.
The community roundup is our highlight of interesting things being mentioned in the Glorantha-related Facebook groups, sub-Reddits, and other similar online places.
Newt’s Awesome Broo
Newt Newport (of D101 Games and OpenQuest fame) is going through a Gloranthan relapse over at his Arkat’s Playground blog. This article on “Why I Keep Coming Back to Glorantha” is a nice love letter to the setting… but also I love that giant Broo miniature!
I came across a couple of rare RuneQuest actual plays that some of you might be interested in. I haven’t listened to or watched them yet so I can’t vouch for them.
The first one is a podcast from Just Barbarian Things, and it runs through most of the Starter Set (except the Rainbow Mounds) in almost a dozen episodes.
The other one is from the Esoteric Order of Roleplayers (who feature in the above podcast). They have one series called Prophecies of Doom that goes through The Broken Tower, some Apple Lane action, and Snakepipe Hollow. And then there’s another unnamed series that is a bit more eclectic in its adventure choices, with a mix of The Rattling Wind, Gaumata’s Vision, and more.
Claudia is part of Jeff’s house campaigns with notable characters like Gina Gravedancer in the White Bull campaign, Yanioth, and the snake-dancer mystic in the HeroQuest Glorantha examples. Claudia is also the author of an upcoming Gloranthan cookbook. It is about 95% done, and is a travel guide accompanying Yanioth and Sorala, from Boldhome via New Pavis to Wintertop.
The difficulty level is kept rather low. There are recipes for starting your own yeast or sourdough, although you can buy finished starters. The travelogue also takes down their experience, like pub crawls, feasting with Argrath, etc. Kitchen hardware includes a fire-pit, a big cauldron (preferable out of enchanted iron), and the usual cutlery.
Katrin is the sole illustrator of the upcoming Prosoaedia, with two pieces in the Starter Set. Katrin is also prominent in the Jonstown Compendium, as in History of Malkionism, Six Paths, some pieces in Corn Dolls, and a major contribution of map-like illustrations for the travelogue narrative and numerous smaller pieces in Martin Helsdon’s upcoming book on ships and sailing around southern Genertela. That book will also feature quite a number of illustrations by Mark Smylie. See links at the bottom of these show notes.
Ludo talks about the Aztec-like style of representations of deities for the Prosopaedia and the pantheon maps.
Main Topic: Ernaldan Adventuresses
Today’s topic is about Ernalda, the Queen of the Gods.
Claudia as the professional Ernalda player does a short presentation of the Earth goddesses.
We learn about the in-house brainstorming sessions between Jeff Richard, Claudia and Neil Robinson about how to make the Cult of Ernalda playable for adventuring. The Cult has been around for a long time – she only finds mention as associate cult in Cults of Prax, but her cult was the first to be published for the third edition of RuneQuest, in booklet 5 (the short introduction to Glorantha) of the deluxe boxed set. This was presented in the same long cult format that was used by both Cults of Prax and Cults of Terror (and in the other RQ2 products with cult descriptions).
Ernalda and the accompanying Dendara would remain the only full cult write up for a few years, followed by Kyger Litor in the Trollpak reprint and the expanded other Troll Gods (and Kyker Litor again) in that box, and the three major Elder Races cults in Elder Secrets: Mostal, Aldrya, and Kyger Litor (yet again). The RQ3 Renaissance brought us updated cults of Yelmalio, the Lightbringers from Cults of Prax, Zola Fel, Cacodemon and the Cults of Terror reprint Lords of Terror.
Claudia advocated a course for playing Ernalda cultists that she dubs as “Blood, Sex and Rock’n Roll”. Ernalda is about sacrifices of animals, with the meat being used for feasts giving back to the communities, and her rites also include quite a bit of sex as a healthy community requires a steady supply of children.
Ernalda is at the heart of the Orlanthi communities. Claudia points out that initiates and even more so God Talkers and Priestesses of Ernalda are welcome in any Orlanthi community.
Claudia stresses the importance of the Charisma spell and how her characters tend to solve a lot of problems using the skills Sing and Dance for ritual support of other players or in worship. For conflicts, there are war songs, battle cries, and war dances, possibly intoxicated on drugs or ritual drinks.
In the new treatment, Ernalda becomes an active deity rather than the damsel in distress.
We go through the other Earth goddesses:
Babeester Gor is the always angry death-wielding daughter of Ernalda. Fairly easy to play, but possibly a bit one-dimensional.
Maran Gor , the Earth Shaker goddess, who still remains a challenge for an interesting character concept.
Ty Kora Tek, which lets you play a necromancer in Glorantha. Ty Kora Tek is the twin sister of Asrelia, only mentioned as an associate cult in the core rules. She is the caretaker of the souls of the dead, an Underworld goddess who welcomes the dead as they let go of their mundane lives and rest in her halls waiting to be reborn. This makes her an important part of the cycle of life. Ty Kora Tek provides a good afterlife for the dead, as long as their descendants commemorate them with sacrifices and rites. Her role starts with the proper burials of the dead, putting their ghosts to rest, etc.
Claudia points out one problem with all the Earth pantheon cults – all the cool spells are usually rune magic. While you need to be careful about spending your rune points, the spells tend to be kick-ass – Claudia riffs off about Earth elementals, Command Ghost, and others.
Ludo addresses the gender (or sex) limitations of many of these Earth goddesses, at least at the top ranks in the hierarchy.
Katrin re-tells the Making of the Storm Tribe and how Ernalda manages and manipulates all those disorganized and selfish Storm deities, giving them a common foe to unite against. At the end of these events, Orlanth asks his wife how the foe knew about where the meeting was to take place, and Ernalda tells him not to worry about that. Which Orlanth wisely does.
Ludo asks about the relationship between Ernalda and Dendara, and Katrin points out that Dendara (who is mainly the wife of Yelm) is mainly the goddess of wives, whereas Ernalda is the Queen of the Gods and the representation of the Earth without which nothing works.
Ludo points towards Esrolia as the center of her cult’s power, but Claudia stresses her importance already in the more male-cult dominated Sartar. In Nochet, she is the absolute ruler, and can dictate what to do, while in Dragon Pass she has to be a bit more roundabout, reminding kings as well as ordinary people that her blessings come with a cost (sacrifice and worship), and that she can become a bit ugly if neglected.
Ludo asks about the importance to have those female avenger cults like Babeester Gor or Maran when Ernalda has all those husband protector cults she can throw into the breach. Claudia reminds us about the scarcity of worshippers of these cults in Sartar. Esrolia may see a slightly higher proportion, or at least significantly higher absolute numbers because of its much larger population.
Maran Gor has her special temple in the Wintertop area, the Shaker’s Temple. Maran is the goddess of the wrathful earth and of earthquakes, with her worship mainly as propitiation to keep her from destroying or disrupting everything. Babeester is the Earth avenger, which is a rather narrow field.
Babeester Gor is also the lost daughter, standing for a lot of things that Ernalda doesn’t do or encompass. Babeester is angry most of the time, something that Ernalda rarely is.
Katrin gives an example how to make worshippers of Babeester Gor less boring or stereotypical, by stressing the investigative aspect of chasing down offenders. Her hot pursuit of such criminals makes her a possible choice for playing a detective. Ludo talks about “Sherlock Holmes with an axe”.
Ludo compares Babeester Gor’s birth to parents losing their temper, and only to regret the outburst five minutes later.
Claudia emphasizes that roleplaying opportunities can be made where others don’t see them. She talks about planning a role-playing session around a funeral feast with mysterious deaths, in the style of Agatha Christie.
Jörg sums up some of the ideas as having Babeester Gor as a James Bond-like provocateur with a license to kill where husband cults may balk at the prospect.
Ludo asks about how to attract more female players to Glorantha, and whether the cult of Ernalda is the vehicle to do that.
Claudia talks about the male and female archetypes available in RuneQuest and Glorantha. She mentions the considerable initial hurdle to overcome when entering the setting, and how having some of these gender limitations may help a player new to Glorantha to identify with the character.
Once you have made your entry into the setting, you can play around with breaking the expectations of archetypes and requirements.
Claudia tells how almost dying in childbirth gave her a different perspective on motherhood and parenthood in the setting.
Katrin agrees that while some aspects of Bronze Age life and how Glorantha works may appear stark and disturbing, dealing with those can make the experience of the setting richer.
Claudia recounts how she played in the Esrolian campaign around (future) queen Samastina, and how the party made sure that the character got pregnant from an important political marriage, and how Claudia’s Ernaldan priestess helped make sure that she became very pregnant, actually resulting in twins being born. There also were processions where the pregnant queen would emphasize her pregnant belly to the onlookers with gold dust, etc.
On a less exalted level, having a big feast in the village when asking for the blessings of the gods, slaughtering the sacrificial animals and making good dishes out of the meat.
With Ty Kora Tek, it is surprising how many ghosts you can control or lay to rest, gaining quite a bit of oomph out of that.
It is OK to be relegated to a support role in battle situations when you lead the social interactions, which can take up more of the game than actual combat.
Ludo brings up the political game, with intrigue, creating a social as well as an information or even spy network, with lots of minions and followers.
Claudia points out that you will find an Ernaldan shrine or better in even the tiniest village, which allows players of Ernalda cultists to have some sway or, at least, contacts anywhere they go.
Jörg points out that Ernalda is the wedding planner of basically everyone, and the networks of exogamous marriages will give you a female kinswoman in every other tribe.
Claudia emphasizes the role of Ernalda as the wise woman, allowing a player to inject her ideas as divine wisdom into the community.
Katrin talks about that little Ernaldan babooshka you will find in every village without whom everything would cease to function.
Ludo laments that RuneQuest combat can hog a lot of game time, making it hard to keep non-combat type characters engaged in such segments.
Claudia suggests being creative about skills and their application, like challenging Jar-eel using her dance skill, hindering her enough to be able to attain a heroquest station objective despite her opposition. This is well beyond the normal scope of the skill, but in the situation (in a magically different environment) it gave her character a handle on the situation. (But then, that is more of a Questworlds mindset of how to use interestingly named skills.)
The rules system is a guidance, not something set in stone.
Claudia also advocates to leave the healing to characters other than the Earth worshippers. We also learn about why Yanioth has a beast rune of 75%.
Katrin points out that there are better things to do than “I hit ‘em with my sword” for three hours. In one of her games, a Chalana Arroy cultist had their snake familiar entangle a combatant’s legs to take them out without actual bloodshed.
Claudia enthuses about Command Swine when facing Tusk Riders.
Jörg points out that all those monstrous swine were ultimately sent against the people of the region as punishment for neglecting the goddess, showing the ugly side of the cult.
Claudia admits that her earth worshippers tend to have some skill with axe and shield, but that is often more fun to stand back and use your skills in a more creative way. Rather than swinging a sharp implement for hours, she prefers supporting the fighters, cheer-leading them or raising the onlookers as a support force to overwhelm the opposition.
Ludo compares the role of Ernalda as a support character with multi-player video games. Claudia points out that while that may be the case in combat situations, the Ernalda player will often take the spotlight in social interaction, possibly having been the matchmaker for a local, being the first to get access to dirty secrets etc., likely side-lining the combat types.
“There is always another way”: Ludo asks about situations where an Ernaldan character would have spoiled a perfectly fine opportunity to have a battle.
Claudia recalls one game that had been very battle-heavy, to the extent that the entire party decided it was too dangerous, leaving the challenge unanswered. That made for a very short game as the GM had prepared mainly for that conflict.
Other GMs including Jeff experience again and again how a game unfolds very differently from what they prepared, often because of group dynamics, so that may actually be “the other way”.
Sometimes this can come about from real world influences. Katrin reminiscences about a case where a player had to leave abroad for two (weekly) sessions, returning to come into the chaotic aftermath of an attack on their community, gracing the other players and their characters with a scathing “I leave you alone for two weeks, and that’s what happens!”
Heroquesting for and with Ernalda and female archetypes: Claudia gives us a small peek into the playtesting of the new heroquesting rules, using Greg Stafford’s old maps of the hero plane (quite likely something like the “spiral map” that is shown in Arcane Lore) which had aspects of the earth pantheon. Meeting Aldryami, stone trees, doing “not very kids-appropriate” adult interaction, playing with the archetypes and the runes and passions. In the end, runes, passions and rune spells are the major elements that you use in the hero plane rather than mundane skills or average spirit magics.
Carrying children into battle? Putting the peace into a battle scene? Or rather putting Darwinism into action, survival of the fittest? Claudia retorts that Ernalda likes (watching) a fight, then marrying the victor. “Marrying for a year and a day is fine, it’s enough.”
Ernalda has very weird children? “They are all beautiful”. Then Katrin mentions how difficult it was in the catalogue of the gods to fit all of Ernalda’s children into the diagram.
Ludo asks how pregnancies and having kids works out inside the game. Claudia reports how some aspects of real life arrangements getting the grandmother to look after the children crept into the game once, still being easier in game than it would be in real life.
“All the interesting magic is rune magic”. Does Ernalda have a big advantage in that regard? Claudia advocates to go for the throat, dropping the rune spells for good effect, and enjoying failure when it happens as those moments can be the most memorable (and the most fun, at least in hindsight).
Claudia’s favourite spells for earth worshippers:
Earth Elemental
Command Ghost (slay first, interrogate later)
Inviolable
Charisma
How does use of Charisma work out in the game? Ludo points out that the skill boost is likely minimal, but Claudia answers that you don’t need to roll skills, and just play to the story.
Katrin reminds that RuneQuest is not a game of slow attrition, but of few periods of high tension and glossed over dull everyday life.
Claudia also confesses that the GM may award the players regaining the rune points as a reward.
Jörg asks how to make getting back the rune points fun in the game, and Katrin’s suggestion of sacrifice and rites gets appropriated by Claudia’s “a roll in the field”, which leads to the question how much of a veil you drop onto the resulting sex and drugs and rock’n roll. Unsurprisingly, it depends on the people you play with.
In conclusion, Claudia talks about her two images of Ernalda – one is the voluptuous, broad-hipped fertility goddess, the other are the Minoan snake-dancers. Katrin confirms that those curves are a necessary feature when she is drawing Earth characters.
And with that, we conclude our episode.
References
While quite a few of the projects mentioned above still need to get published, here is a list of works already that feature Katrin’s stunning art prominently:
The History of Malkionism by Nick Brooke, illuminated by Katrin Dirim, with extensive bonus material on the art direction
The Six Paths, a sourcebook on gender among the Heortlings, by Edan Jones, art by Katrin Dirim
Welcome to a new issue of the Journal of Runic Studies, the premier Malkioni publication for studies into the nature of Glorantha. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please consult with the spirit bound to the appropriate electronic page.
There isn’t much this week (especially in the way of annotation) because I was away or otherwise busy all week-end. Don’t forget however that you can send “guest segments” to us and we’ll be happy to run them in the newsletter!
By the time this newsletter is released, you’ll have only about two days left to enjoy 30% off from Chaosium’s Redbubble store. Time to get that William Church map dress, or that apron with the Walktapus cooking recipe! And if that’s not your style, don’t worry, there’s a lot of other less silly things, like cult affiliation t-shirts and Rune mugs.
White Bull Campaign S03E08
Jeff’s campaign continues, and he doesn’t lead his players to the nicest places in Glorantha…
Jonstown Compendium
The Jonstown Compendium is Chaosium’s community content program for all Gloranthan games, hosted on DriveThruRPG. Disclaimer: all the relevant links are affiliate links that hopefully will let us cover some of the hosting and maintenance costs for the website and podcast! Thanks for using them!
There’s nothing new on the Jonstown Compendium this week, but I’d like to highlight how nice it is that Chaosium supports its community creators by releasing regular blog posts promoting recent community releases. You can read the latest one here.
Jeff’s Notes
Jeff Richard, the current mastermind on everything Gloranthan at Chaosium, is often posting notes and thoughts on the RuneQuest Facebook group. Here’s our curated list from the past week. A partial archive of these sources is compiled on the Well of Daliath.
As mentioned in the introduction, there’s only a few links this week since I had no time last week to do any research or writing on this:
The Lunar Army in the Early Hero Wars: The number of soldiers in the Lunar Empire’s armies takes a big hit between 1621 and 1625. Here are all the numbers.
History of the Provincial Overseer: One of the fun things about the Lunar Empire is all the bureaucracy!
Tides Around the Choralinthor Bay: This note on the tides of Choralinthor Bay revealed something I wasn’t aware of until now: if you have a knowledgeable local guide, you can sail through the Left or Right Arms of the Holy Country (depending on the tides indeed). Otherwise you have to go through the Troll Straights.
Mesopotamia and Gloranthan Worldbuilding: Jeff is reading some history books and sharing some worldbuilding notes. This is followed by another note about the Lunar Empire’s economy, and a third one about Sartar’s cities and towns. I like how Sartar (the guy, not the country) was a cultural and societal reformist, whereas Argrath is a military and magical reformist.
Issaries, Lhankor Mhy, and Chalana Arroy: Here’s a look at some of the Lightbringers’ deities. First is Issaries, who is most known as the trade god. There are a few clarifications about why merchants use mules, what Issaries magic is good for, and where Argan Argar fits in the picture. Second is Lhankor Mhy, the “Knowing God” of scribes and other intellectuals. Last is Chalana Arroy, the “Goddess of Mercy”. Both of these deities also get some helpful tips and summaries about what their magic is good for.
Oakfed: For something different, there’s also a note on Oakfed, the Praxian spirit cult for wildfires.
The community roundup is our highlight of interesting things being mentioned in the Glorantha-related Facebook groups, sub-Reddits, and other similar online places.
The reason I still game today really comes down to a man named Steve Perrin, who sadly passed away recently, who welcomed a weird teenage girl to his table, and let me be silly, and loud, and comfortable.
I found his table because my then-boyfriend, Tom, was one of his players, and Tom’s parents were there too, and so no one thought it was weird that this adult man had a teenage girl in his garage three times a week.
Steve gave me dice. Steve taught me about consent and sharing space and telling a story with my friends. Steve taught me that gaming wasn’t just essential for my mental health, it could be FUN and non-toxic.
Steve is the reason I hold, to this day, that it’s not strange for adults to hold space for teens at their tables. It’s ESSENTIAL. It’s delicate, and you’ll have to be careful with some things–I’m not saying “all games must”–but Steve domesticated me.
Good job, Steve.
Elsewhere on Arachne Solara’s Web
Not everything is about Glorantha, although most things are! Here are loosely relevant things that we found on the interwebs.
Roman Cities and Armies
I already knew that the curiously organized Digital Maps of the Ancient World had some interactive maps of Roman Cities, which you can use as inspiration for Lunar settlements. But I just found out that they also have a page on the Roman Legion, with some useful basics and, more importantly, some cool terms and legion names you can throw around in your games.
Maa (Mother) Kali, is the name that brings back memories of my childhood from the town of Jalpaiguri in India. In my father’s ancestral house, we used to hold Kali-pujo (a worship ritual celebrating the Goddess Kali) with our huge extended family and it was a jubilant and joyous occasion. I saw my grandmother, pious and devoted to the pujo, fasting for two days before offering prayers to Maa Kali. My mother and aunts used to help with the khichuri bhog (food offering). To me, Kali-pujo was an amalgamation of incense, lights and homecoming.
Photo from the British Museum
Our Kali, unlike the new one at the British Museum, was blue. I once asked my mother why is Maa Kali black in some places and blue in others? My mother replied, “It is how the creator of the statue wants to portray her that defines her body colour. For some she is the epitome of matri-shakti (maternal strength) – strong but calm like the sky and a kind protector, like a mother who protects her children… for others, her image signifies the destroyer of evils, wild and intense like the ocean. Maa Kali is the power of divine over demon. She is our mother”.
See, even Gloranthans probably ask their elders why Orlanth is sometimes painted blue and sometimes not…
“The discovery of the deposit allows us to understand how the ancient Maya of Palenque constantly revived the mythical passage on the birth, death and resurrection of the maize god,” Arnoldo González Cruz, an archaeologist who was part of the find, says in a statement.
Photo by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH)
The nine-inch-tall head had an east-west orientation that archaeologists believe represents the emergence of the maize plant at dawn, per INAH. They say Palenque’s Maya residents likely placed the large stone sculpture over a pond to symbolize the entrance to the underworld. The sculpture was intended to depict a beheaded figure, echoing other Maya art depicting various headless gods.
I think Ernalda and the grain goddesses have it easy compared to the Mayan gods:
As such, the Maya worshipped Hun Hunahpu, whom they believed was decapitated every fall around harvest time, then reborn the following spring at the start of the new growing season
Maize was not only important as a source of food, it also played a role in the Mayan creation myths, in which humans were created out of corn. There’s more on that here, including the following video:
Thank you for reading
That’s it for this week! Please contact us with any feedback, question, or news item we’ve missed!
Welcome to a new issue of the Journal of Runic Studies, the premier Malkioni publication for studies into the nature of Glorantha. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please consult with the spirit bound to the appropriate electronic page.
Here is what us God Learners were up to this week.
Initiation Series Episode 11: Juan, and the Most Unlikely Glorantha Book to Start With
In episode 11 of our Initiation Series, we chat with Juan Ochoa, an illustrator that fell in love with Glorantha with the most unlikely book you could ever start with! We also talk about gaming shops in Columbia, alternative systems for Glorantha, avoiding the metaplot, linguisitcs, and more!
Chaosium News
Here are this week’s Chaosium news!
White Bull Campaign, A New Hero, and other RuneQuest Actual Plays
I just started catching up with the White Bull campaign after finishing the New Hero series which, by the way, James said would come back after GenCon but hasn’t yet… which makes me sad because it was quite good. They only ran two adventures but I found that they were both very Gloranthan and quite interesting.
As an aside, watching James, Bridgett, and David struggle at times with the rules lets me bang some more on that dead horse of mine that is the RuneQuest system. For instance, James mixes up the augment rules a few times, but that’s totally not his fault: it’s the system’s fault! It’s baffling to me that skill, Rune, and Passion augments don’t work the same, and that gamemasters and players need to memorize different modifier scales and mechanics for what should be, in my opinion, one simple unified mechanic. And then there are the success levels or the attack/parry results — I also don’t blame James here, because after running RuneQuest for a year and a half I still have to look them up on the gamemaster screen myself! But why? This could also be a much simpler unified mechanic…
Ultimately, I think this is why there’s virtually no RuneQuest actual plays out there apart from those that Chaosium directly sponsors. People who do actual plays want to provide compelling narrative entertainment, and that generally means using a system that “gets out of the way”. My theory is that the streamlining that went into Call of Cthulhu 7th edition played a big part in achieving that, which led to a lot of actual plays picking up the game, which in turn led to increased visibility and adoption. Crunchy systems don’t get a lot of air time, and RuneQuest is factually crunchy, I don’t care what the grognards say.
Miniatures VS Theatre of the Mind
Jeff’s latest interview on the Chaosium channel deals with “minitatures” vs “theatre of the mind”. Of the many discussion topics in TTRPG spaces, I think this is one where almost everybody agrees that “it depends” — it depends on the players and the group, it depends on the game, and so on. For instance, a game of Savage Worlds is more likely to have miniature combat compared to a game of Call of Cthulhu.
Personally, I find the dichotomy to be rather false. There are a few levels in between. For instance, I might most of the time start with theatre of the mind, but if players ask many questions about the environment, I might start to draw some crude map on a portable whiteboard or sheet of paper. These are (on purpose) too small to be used as any kind of battlemat so they are more akin to handouts. But then we might start drawing markers and arrows on there. And then sometimes we bust out the battlemat and use figurines.
Another thing that Jeff mentioned and that I’ve thought a lot about is how online play and VTTs are possibly skewing the new generation of gamers towards the “wargame end” of the spectrum. In my opinion, VTTs get RPGs wrong by reserving 90% of the screen to the map. When running online, I have the video feed of my players on my main screen. The VTT and everything else goes on the second screen. The people is the main thing.
TTRPG Writing Styles
Here is an interesting interview with Jason Durall (line editor for RuneQuest, but also a prolific author and editor with other publishers besides Chaosium). It deals with the various tones and writing styles found in RPGs, and how they fit different games. This is potentially insightful for Jonstown Compendium authors, for instance.
Jonstown Compendium
The Jonstown Compendium is Chaosium’s community content program for all Gloranthan games, hosted on DriveThruRPG. Disclaimer: all the relevant links are affiliate links that hopefully will let us cover some of the hosting and maintenance costs for the website and podcast! Thanks for using them!
Somewhere in Glorantha
“Somewhere in Glorantha” is a book by Mark Prier that contains a whole bunch of tables for picking a place at random in Glorantha, with references for what book(s) you can find information about it.
Map of Melib
The island of Melib gets the Mikael Mansen treatment. This is a good opportunity for you to check out the write-up for Melib in the Guide to Glorantha, and decide that maybe you should give a boat to your players!
Jeff’s Notes
Jeff Richard, the current mastermind on everything Gloranthan at Chaosium, is often posting notes and thoughts on the RuneQuest Facebook group. Here’s our curated list from the past week. A partial archive of these sources is compiled on the Well of Daliath.
Arkat’s Heirs
Arkat is one of those big chunks of Gloranthan lore that I know little about, so this note about his two alleged sons was a good opportunity for me to go read up on him. Here are some extra notes for your pleasure.
The first son mentioned here is Gerlant Flamesword, who is known to have helped Arkat when he devastated Dorastor. He went on to be a Seshnelan King in the second half of the 5th century. His flaming sword has been part of the royal Seshnelan regalia ever since, even though it has been lost and recovered a few times. Imagine how awkward it would be if one of your players found a “cool flaming sword” in a dungeon, only to have westerners come knocking on his door in Apple Lane soon after…
The other son is more interesting: Talor the Laughing Warrior is the one that cursed the Telmori! Here’s how it went: the Telmori were originally a Hsunshen tribe like the others, with the wolf as their totem animal. But they sided with Nysalor, who gave them the pretty cool blessing of super-duper magical armour. That’s how the Telmori are immune to most weapons while fully or partially in wolf shape. Talor fought the Telmori in the war between Arkat and Nysalor (known as the Gbaji Wars) and managed to curse them with the lycantropy we now know. I’m not sure how much of a curse it is to give your enemies free shape-shifting one day per week but hey, I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Talor’s got a bunch of other cool things about him, from being brought back from the dead by Harmast, to being part of some Hero Wars prophecy. Jeff gives some editorial info on it, actually:
Harmast doing the full LBQ twice has been around since Cults of Terror, although I think the Guide was the first publication it was made explicit. Early on, Greg wrote that the first Lightbringers Quest was viewed as a failure when Arkat turned to the darkness, and that Harmast went on a second quest to find proper help. He returned with Talor the Laughing Warrior, who later became the first King of Loskalm.
Talor and Gerlant are now considered “ascendent masters” in some Malkioni sects.
The Empire of Land and Sea, aka The Middle Sea Empire, is the empire of the God Learners. It lasted only a couple centuries, from 789 to 990, but during this time it conquered most of the coastal lands of Genertela and Pamaltela.
For two hundred years the Jrusteli dynasty ruled as the Emperor of the Land and Sea. This was a new title, created in 789 with the acclamation of the Jrusteli Alliance, the Umathelan Coalition, and the Kingdom of Seshnela-Tanisor. At the time, the people acknowledging the Emperor of the Land and Sea as suzerain likely numbered 15-20 million or more, making it easily the largest empire in Gloranthan history.
There’s a bunch more information on the imperial fleet, but what’s interesting to me is the cult of the Emperor himself:
The Emperor of the Land and Sea was the subject of cult, associated with the Runes of Man, Luck, and Mastery. He was often associated with Water as well, as the Emperor had no fixed capital until the oceans were Closed off in 930.
[…]
Across the world, people offered cult to the Divine Fortune of the Emperor, a manifestation of the luck and fortune that made and preserved the Middle Sea Empire. This fortune was lost by Emperor Ilotos around 910 or so, and by 990 the Middle Sea Empire was no more.
There isn’t much about Ilotos unless you go into the wildly non-canonical Mongoose RuneQuest material focused on Glorantha’s Second Age (although some of it is written by Robin Laws, so it might contain a fair amount of Greg-approved material).
I’m not sure if Ilotos is to blame for the fall of Middle Sea Empire, though, as Jeff’s phrasing may or may not imply. As far as I can tell, the last decades of the empire are mostly a series of bad luck and hubris. All the shit the God Learners have been up to for more than a century catches up to them in an apocalyptic way. That’s just life, man.
This was the high point of Malkionism. A world-emperor, subject only to the Invisible God, who was perfectly fine with having Wachaza-worshipping marines and bodyguards, tamed gods and goddesses, and whose sorcerers could summon and command other gods to aid him.
Wachaza is a war god of the water pantheon, worshipped by merfolk and sea-faring fighters alike. You can look up its Rune magic in the Red Book of Magic: Drown (fill up someone’s lungs with water!), Seastrength (double your STR as long as there’s sea-water nearby!), and Fang of Wachaza (a whooping 5-point spell that makes pointy things pretty much as deadly as a Sever Spirit!)
Remember that, unlike what you might hear elsewhere, the Malkioni are not atheists. They very much know that the gods exist… the Malkioni just think they’re way too good to worship them. The gods are, instead, tools, just like spirits. People are tools too, and if letting them worship gods makes them more effective tools, that’s cool.
After the Middle Sea Empire
So we were just talking about the end of the Middle Sea Empire. What comes next?
Malkionism in the Third Age is a pathetic shade of its Second Age glory. The Middle Sea Empire ended in 990 and about a half-century later, Seshnela was shattered by the Luathelans. The great citadels of Malkionism – Frowal, Laurmal, Damolsket, Neleoswal, Orphalsket, and Old Pasos – all destroyed.
The Luathelans are quasi-divine violet-skinned beings that come from the Luathan Islands, at the western edge of Glorantha. There isn’t much known about them because we’re almost in the Gods World at this point: the Luatha Islands are believed to be (among other things) where the Gate of Dusk resides: that’s the giant well in which the sun goes when it sets in the evening. Of course, it leads to the Underworld, and there’s a Gate of Dawn at the eastern edge of the world for when the sun rises in the morning.
When the Closing of the Seas came, the Luathelans showed up in big ships, shoved a large iron pillar into the ground in Seshnela, and triggered some massive quake that shook the whole peninsula and shattered it to bits. About a million people died in one day, and vast amounts of knowledge were lost.
Weep at how much learning was lost in the West and how backwards modern Malkioni would look in the Second Age.
Of note, much later when Dormal re-opened the Seas in 1580, he travelled around Glorantha until, two years later, he disappeared going westward to find Luathela. But anyway, back to the early 1000s:
For three and a half centuries, Seshnela and Tanisor were an anarchy of petty robber baron clans of armored horsemen, who extracted tribute and support from the peasantry. Sorcerous learning survived in a few strongholds, in particular Leplain, the City of Wizards.
Leplain is where the home of the Rokari School of Magic is located, headed by the “Watcher Supreme” (which sounds like a Marvel character, right?) There are a few other schools, too, which makes Leplain one of the most important places for Malkioni sorcery. And with this comes enough political power to backup a Duke of Rindland called Bailifes when he decides to unify the area. This comes with benefits:
[Bailifes] would protect the sorcerers of the Rokari school and grant them oversight over matters of magic and learning. In exchange, they would support Bailifes and his family, and acknowledge them as the rulers.
In 1414, after his cavalry smashed the southern nobles at two battles, the Rokari proclaimed Bailifes King of Seshnela. This alliance between the Bailifids and the Rokari has been extremely successful for both groups, and the Bailifids have suzerainty over all the other “baronial clans”.
The note then describes how this political alliance allowed the Rokari wizard to enforce a few additional rules upon the population: the formalization of the caste system that the Malkioni are so found of (dividing people between rulers, sorcerers, workers, and soldiers), the Rokari having approval/veto power over which gods and spirits are worshipped by the population, and Bailifes becoming “deputy” of the Invisible God. This effectively provides the support system that the wizards need to be full time wizards.
It’s interesting to see Jeff provide an Islamic-Indian picture to give us the vibe of this new Seshnelan nation. That’s a welcome change from the old classic European medieval takes on the Genertelan West, with Merlin-looking alchemists and sorcerers… the picture depicts the Ibadat Khana, a building designed by Mughal Emperor Akbar I in 16th century India as a place where intellectuals and spiritual leads could exchange ideas and teachings. Jeff’s Gloranthan take on the picture is “King Ulianus IV meeting with ranking zzaburi, Safelstran priests, and visiting Brithini“, dating this scene to around 1500 in Glorantha. Funny, it’s close to the real-world date, too!
The Rokari are rightfully called the “realists”. They recognized that they needed to work with the Bailifides, and made a pragmatic bargain that has withheld the test of time. I could imagine a Rokari Machiavelli writing about the need to look at effectual truths rather than “imagined republics and principalities.”
In truth, I imagine that the Secret Secretorum is a common literary conceit where wizards write advice to the king in the form of letters from Malkion to Talor.
The Secretum Secretorum is a series of letters that were supposedly written by Aristotle to his student Alexander The Great, even though it’s almost certainly a book written much later and without much to do with either of these historical figures. Plato and other philosophers used similar techniques in their texts. So I figure that whenever your Lhankor Mhy player character is told to find an “ancient text written by Malkion himself” or whatever, there’s actually a good chance it was simply written by an old philosopher using whatever narrative device was popular at the time… still, that doesn’t mean the text isn’t very valuable!
The Sygian Heresy
There isn’t much about the Stygian Heresy in the main published materials, but from what I understand it describes the various different sects of Arkatists — the people who follow the teachings of Arkat, the First Age anti-hero who embraced Death and Darkness to destroy Nysalor’s Empire of Light. Don’t mix it up with “Stygianism”, a branch of Arkati Malkionism that holds that everything came from Darkness, and to Darkness they shall go back.
Anyway, Jeff looks at Arkat’s teachings, which seem to boil down to “you can’t know what you haven’t experienced“. So you can’t know divinity unless you’ve been a god, and that kind of stuff.
“To destroy a monster, I became a monster. To wield Death, I became Death.”
This sort of talk disturbed our poor rationalists to the very marrow of their bones!
Jeff then explains how, when Arkat’s Dark Empire was destroyed, it was scattered into many small hidden sects that took Arkatism in various directions. When they came back to the open several centuries later, they were so different and disagreeing that they fought each other, over stuff like:
– A group claims to be in contact with the Hidden Arkat (or at least with the hidden heir of Paslac) – A group claims to know when Arkat will return and is preparing for his return. – A group claims to know THE secret of Arkat, the one he whispered to his truest companion (whose biological or spiritual descendant founded the sect) and survived the God Learners.
In a follow up note, Jeff goes over what these various sects have in common (knowing secret Arkati stuff, fighting whatever they decide is an incarnation of Gbaji The Deceiver, etc.)
Some sects openly display themselves. However, most hide and pretend to be orthodox Malkioni (especially Rokari) or are initiates of other local cults. […]
The term “Stygian Heresy” is of course not what they call themselves, but it connotes not only Arkat’s associations with Darkness, but the sects’ claims to have secret wisdom and esoteric lineages that they keep hidden “in the Stygian dark.” It does not necessarily mean that the sect worships the Gods of Darkness, although many do (but others worship Lightbringers, in particular Orlanth and Humakt, and still others claim to be Hrestoli).
So one thing that should be obvious about Malkionism compared to other cults – it is primarily a philosophical system, rather than a connection with a god or spirit. The Invisible God is out of reach – that’s why it is called that. The Invisible God provides no magic in return for worship, any more than Arachne Solara or Glorantha do.
And:
Malkionism has usually co-existed with divine and spirit cults. The Talar Froalar mated with the goddess Seshna Likita and their child Yrealm the Serpent-Legged became the Sacred Lord of Seshnela. Seshna Likita, the Storm God, Magasta, Neliom, etc. all were popular cults. Throughout the First Age, Seshnela was a mix of Invisible God worshipping wizards, divine and spirit cults, Hrestoli “knights”, and rulers that treated this like an a la carte buffet.
But in game, if you are a Malkioni you are either:
1. A wizard, who uses sorcery exclusively. 2. Someone else, who uses a combination of spirit magic and Rune magic (from Ancestor worship, caste appropriate cults, hero cults, etc.), and is buffed by sorcery cast by a wizard.
My take on the west isn’t very original, as I stole it from Ars Magica. I figure that the wizards would only get involved once every few adventures, spending the rest of their time doing research and rituals. The other characters are their servants, bodyguards, and assistants who go on missions on behalf of their master. Troupe play would indeed work well here in my opinion (again, thanks to Ars Magica for that).
Jeff gives details on the Ascended Master hero worship of Xemela, but it doesn’t actually includes gameplay rules. I figure that the wizard’s sidekicks would mix classic cult membership (mostly from the Orlanthi pantheon) and specific hero cults like Xemela’s, each giving one or two Rune spells at most.
Loskalm and New Hrestolism
Loskalm is where some of the Pendragon-esque medieval tendencies of both game designers and players leaked into Glorantha’s otherwise ancient world setting. The reason for this is that most of the area has embraced “New Hrestolism”, a branch of Malkioni philosophy that embraces the caste system (workers, soldiers, wizards, rulers) but at the same time embraces social mobility, wherein most people try to actually pass through all these castes in their lifetime. Those who excel in all castes are “men-of-all”, and have been occasionally described as “knights”, which easily conjures potentially erroneous mental pictures of 8th century Western Europe.
[New Hrestolism] placed a great value on a type of elite horse-riding warrior that wandered around the countryside to right the wrongs done to the common people by the powers that be – called “men-of-all”, but you can imagine them as knight-errants, youxia, bogatyrs, etc. They followed the Code of Hrestol and were expected to be equally skilled with sword, horse, spear, poem, lore, and courtesy.
In order to mix up your mental pictures, Jeff here provides other references — although they all basically refer to “cool looking errand hero who goes back on the road after each adventure“. Besides the European knight-errant (like Lancelot) and the Chinese youxia (like the old TV-series Kung-fu!), you could also include the Japanese ronin (like in Kurosawa’s most famous movies). I didn’t know about the Eastern European bogatyr but it’s the same idea.
Jeff tries to explain that this man-of-all concept is somewhat linked to the “dualism” that exists at the core of Hrestolism:
In Loskalm, Malkionism developed a strong current of dualism, positing that the Invisible God’s awareness of itself created a lesser (and flawed) demiurge that in turn created lesser emanations – powers, elements – which in turn multiplied and combined, which resulted in the gods. The gods were flawed and self-willed and fought among themselves, bringing Chaos into the world. All of material reality is thus tainted with entropy and corruption. Ideals became associated with light and the good; matter became associated with darkness and evil.
I don’t really see the link between the two, so…. ok? Maybe the point is that they want to go back to the idealism of the single creator entity who does and is everything, so they build their society in a way that selects for exceptional people who can indeed do and be everything, from farmer to artisan to soldier to philosopher to ruler? I don’t know, I was always taught that multi-classing was inefficient…
The good thing is that Jeff also explains clearly for the first time why the hell the Syndics Ban happened. You might remember that Prince Snodal, a great Loskalmi man-of-all, killed the Fronelan God of Communication and cut off most of northwestern Genertela from the rest of world, with various regions effectively living in their own little pocket reality.
The most famous of these wandering heroes, Prince Snodal, saved Loskalm from its doom when he organised the conspiracy that slew the God of the Silver Feet and instituted the Syndics Ban. The Ban cut Loskalm off from the corrupt world and allowed Prince Snodal’s son Siglat the Wise to radically reform Loskalmi society and institutions.
I guess that’s protectionist politics taken to an extreme. I hope the UK government doesn’t read Gloranthan lore, or they might get more bright ideas…
Anyway, read the rest of the note for some details on the New Hrestoli caste system, some population numbers for Loskalm, and various other comments on Snodal, the ban, and usable references. In particular, you’ll see that the fact that caste mobility exists doesn’t mean everybody can do what they want — you still need to go through a (probably very nepotic) vetting system to upgrade from one caste to the next! But note how Loskalmi people start learning sorcery at the latest when they get to the “Guardian” (soldier) level.
You’ve got the Malkioni and the Lightbringer worshippers and the Lunars and such. But there’s also the “Barbarian ‘Old Gods'”.
These are areas that in the First Age were predominantly a combination of Hsunchen and other Beast cults, spirit cults and shamanism. Pendali, Telmori, Galanini, Tawari, etc. They got exposed to both the Lightbringers and Malkioni, and sampled both like an à la carte buffet. Along the Janube River, we have the Arrolian Territories, as well as the Sky-worshippers. In Safelster, we have Stygian heresies, Ehilm worship, city gods, and grain goddesses, as well as Lightbringers and orthodox Malkioni.
Those “Old Gods” areas are going to be some of the more heterogenous areas in Genertela. Every city might have a different ruling cult, or even no ruling cult at all.
Read the note for some example of how a given area can mix up classic Orlanthi religion with old Second Age traditions and more.
Lhankor Mhy Sorcery
The Malkioni aren’t the only ones using sorcery: as a starter RuneQuest character you can do a bit of it yourself with, say, the Lhankor Mhy cult.
But the Knowing Priests are largely self-taught amateurs when it comes to sorcery. Temples tend to know a limited subset of spells and that’s about it. Knowing Priests are of course welcome to learn more – but remember, Malkioni wizards aren’t just going to teach their secrets to some barbarian scribe!
Lots of good details in that note to put into context Lhankor Mhy’s relationship with sorcery.
Jeff shares a bit about his thought process when world-building a region. This is similar to mine actually. I built a similar spreadsheet when figuring out my Far Place campaign:
Of course, back when I built this spreadsheet I only had a couple of data points: the Colymar tribe from the gamemaster pack, the Red Cow campaign books, and so on. That’s why if you zoom in, you’ll see I’m combining old terms like “carls” and “cottars” with newer concepts. I could clean up this spreadsheet quite a lot now that we have more modern RuneQuest data points…
The Machine Ruins
Here is a note about the Clanking City, which was home to a bunch of atheistic sorcerers and crafters and smiths who literally built an artificial deity know as the Machine God. The neighbours didn’t like the noise and the smell, but probably above all they didn’t like the idea behind the whole thing.
The dwarves, trolls, humans, and dragonewts of the Shadowlands united to destroy this abomination.
The ten-year siege of the Clanking CIty became one of the epic battles at the end of the Second Age. The inhabitants were aided by wizards who also lived near the isle, and by many Jrusteli refugees from other cities. The struggle is known to people from all over the region, and for a while it almost seemed that the Elder Races would forge anew the forgotten unity of the past. Through such cooperation, the city finally fell, Its inhabitants slaughtered, its stones scattered, and its metals plundered.
What’s left behind is a mix of “Da Vinci-punk” contraptions and blueprints lost in the middle of stone and metallic ruins, protected by troll spirit guardians who don’t want anybody to get any idea from looking to closely at all that crap.
There are more details in the note, along with some comments about Esvularela and the Bandori valley.
Last is a note about the Shadowlands, which as far as I understand was the name of most of the Holy Country in the First Age when the trolls (and the Only Old One) ruled the entire place. They did this mostly through the Shadow Tribute, which everybody around there paid as a “thank you” to the trolls for helping them survive the Great Darkness.
Anyway, Jeff provides details about the Jrusteli and the Empire of the Wyrm’s Friends’ assets in the area, and the possible cultural exchange that happened between the two.
Community Roundup
The community roundup is our highlight of interesting things being mentioned in the Glorantha-related Facebook groups, sub-Reddits, and other similar online places.
When we came to the place under question, myself, two scribes, six others of the hazar rank, and eight peasant baggage carriers, I was immediately appalled to see the condition of the temple complex. They had removed what seemed to be half of the shrines, most especially the one to the Red Goddess of the east and to our benevolent ally her son etc. I looked about for a functionary to smite with my staff of office, or possibly even my fist. One came forth, but alas, he too was of the vizier rank and so I could do no more than perform the Vibratio Castigiationis at him.
Since I haven’t read the Stafford library, I’ve got no idea what I’m looking at, but hey as always it’s well written and a bit funny. I’m sure Joerg will be able to say something more insightful than me, though.
The earliest example of a bar joke is Sumerian, on a tablet dating from the early Old Babylonian Empire (c. 1894–1800 BC), and it features a dog: “A dog, having walked into an inn, did not see anything, (and so he said): ‘Shall I open this (door)?’.” One proposed explanation of the joke is that the punchline presumes an inn would also be a brothel, and the humour suggests the dog is hoping to see what transpired out of view. Another proposed explanation is that the joke refers to the opening of the eyes, the punchline being that the dog could not see anything because its eyes were closed.
Iconic Productions, makers of Exploring Glorantha (among other things) is running a contest in which you can win Drew Baker’s “Return to the Big Rubble” PDFs! Check out their Facebook and Twitter accounts for more information.
Elsewhere on Arachne Solara’s Web
Not everything is about Glorantha, although most things are! Here are loosely relevant things that we found on the interwebs.
Persepolis Reimagined
Persepolis was the “ceremonial capital” of the Achaemenid Empire, dating back to around 500 BC. Its ruins are now in modern day Iran. Many reconstructions have been made of the city and its magnificent gates and temples, but not all of them can be experienced in your browser! Check out this beautifully interactive visit of the city: Persepolis Reimagined.
Make sure to run this on a good machine, and preferably with some audio. The music and 3D graphics are quite nice but got my old laptop to overheat badly. All fine on my desktop computer though.
The Dispilio Tablet
David Scott points to a recent article on the Dispilio tablet, a greek artifact discovered in 1993 that features some early forms of writing from 5200 BC. The article gets a bit sensationalist about “the Real Origins of Writing” (this is common on Ancient Origins), but in reality it’s a bit more complicated — it really depends what you consider “proper” writing and what you consider “proto-writing” (some of which goes back to the 7th millenium BC in a few different spots on the planet).
In episode 11 of our Initiation Series, we chat with Juan Ochoa, an illustrator that fell in love with Glorantha with the most unlikely book you could ever start with. And he wishes he had started with King of Sartar instead!
Other things we chat about in this episode:
The one RPG shop in Columbia
Having a player buy more books than the gamemaster
Running Glorantha with the crunch of RuneQuest, or with FATE, or with Mythras
Playing in the west to avoid the “Argrath Cinematic Universe”
How to deal with diverging from the metaplot
Tekumel and Middle Earth as very linguistically developed settings
Welcome to a new issue of the Journal of Runic Studies, the premier Malkioni publication for studies into the nature of Glorantha. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please consult with the spirit bound to the appropriate electronic page.
This week we enabled the ability for people to comment on our blog posts, which includes podcast episodes and Journal of Runic Studies issues. This is an experiment, and it may or may not feature some occasional comment from Joerg himself when he wants to voice a disagreement with me or finds the need to correct my superficial lore knowledge. Anyway, come say hello!
There’s another “Out of the Suitcase” article on Chaosium’s blog! And like the last one, it’s about old RuneQuest miniatures.
Chessex just happens to be based in Ft. Wayne too, and their HQ is only about 10 minutes from our hotel. My colleague Dustin and I decided to just swing by see if Don was in the office and luckily he was, and he graciously took the time to give us the 10 cent tour.
Don’s history with Chaosium goes back to almost the beginning, back to when he worked at Games of Berkeley. That’s the company that became the importer of Citadel’s range of minis for RuneQuest in the early 1980s, which I talked about in my previous post.
The article will tell you the value of keeping old product catalogues around!
Recently I found myself checking back on some of the Q&A, in particular this long list of answers to common questions about the Summons of Evil, which is bound to be very confusing to any Gloranthan newcomer (as it was for me).
What is Evil?
I think I had missed this interview between James and Jeff last week. Jeff goes over the basics of “evil” in TTRPGs. I don’t think there’s anything you educated and refined folks wouldn’t know there, but you can definitely send this video to any friend who is still killing goblins without remorse in their D&D game.
Jonstown Compendium
The Jonstown Compendium is Chaosium’s community content program for all Gloranthan games, hosted on DriveThruRPG. Disclaimer: all the relevant links are affiliate links that hopefully will let us cover some of the hosting and maintenance costs for the website and podcast! Thanks for using them!
The Seven Tailed Wolf in Print
Andrew Logan Montgomery’s already best-selling third volume in the Haraborn saga is now available in print! Get it here.
Jeff’s Notes
Jeff Richard, the current mastermind on everything Gloranthan at Chaosium, is often posting notes and thoughts on the RuneQuest Facebook group. Here’s our curated list from the past week. A partial archive of these sources is compiled on the Well of Daliath.
Mythical Synthesis and Pantheon Equivalencies
While working on their mythical synthesis, the God Learners built up equivalencies between the pantheons they were familiar with (Theyalan, Dara Happan) and those they encountered during their travels. Jeff offers the main two of those: Pamaltelan Equivalencies and Kralorelan Equivalencies.
They’re basically lists of correspondences between central Genertelan deities and Pamaltelan/Kralorelan deities. I don’t have a clue about these other pantheons so I’m mostly looking at the lists and thinking “yeah, those are funny looking names“. So you’re not going to get any commentary from me (as Joerg for that!) But if you’re going to send your players to the south or the east, that might be a good quick way to grasp who’s doing what in these strange lands.
Remember their goal is pragmatic. Get it right and they can magically master the world. Get it wrong and everything sinks under the waves.
And so for the God Learners (unlike modern academics) all the incentives are to get something that works. Like being able to figure out there must be a God of Fire that Burns on Water and then summoning it to wipe out a hostile navy.
This reminds me of Dmitri Mendeleev, who created one of the early versions of the periodic table of elements. Because he found some meaning and logic between chemical elements, he was able to not only correct some previously incorrect properties about known elements, but also predict three yet-to-be-discovered elements.
So the God Learners might have been able to do the same. They might have been able to look at your local deity and tell you “actually, she’s called XYZ and she can do this other thing you didn’t know about“. And, as Jeff says, they were able to predict the existence of forgotten deities, and go in the Hero Plane to find them. That’s science, kids!
The Grand Ritual of the Third Council
This note is interesting, and not just because it has a map in it! It deals with the Third Council (during the 9th century) and the “Grand Ritual” that sunk them, like a Kickstarter campaign that blows up and destroys your company (it basically led to the end of the Second Age, but that’s another story).
This ritual was going to require massive amounts of magical energy over several generations, and by the end the Third Council members requested people to worship them directly to increase that energy. That didn’t go well. But what caught my eye is the other requirement for the ritual:
The Grand Ritual had countless components and requirements. Among them was the presence of Golden Age beings that predated the separation of Beast and Man – such things as horse-people, bull-people, fox-people, and bird-people. As such liminal creatures did not exist in Dragon Pass, they needed to be made and so the Third Council did just that. The infamous Stitched Zoo is where these unfortunates resided until it was time for them to take their place in the Grand Ritual.
Many people are reading this and going “that’s where the ducks come from!”. Frankly? We’ll never truly know. But what mostly came to my mind was how that ties nicely with what we were talking about in our latest episode on the Tusk Riders. After all, one origin story for them is some sort of cross-breeding and gene-splicing program between the boar-riding tribe of the Aramites and some unspecified group of trolls.
Anyway, we know that this Stitched Zoo is where the Beast People come from.
The infamous Stitched Zoo was outside of Voss Vairanu.
You’ll find Voss Vairanu near the centre of the map below… if you match that to present-day Dragon Pass, you’ll find that it’s smack in the middle of Beast Valley.
A BRP Central thread about the wives and children of Argrath was going into various speculations based on King of Sartar. But given the book’s narrative premise (that of a historical research into Glorantha’s Third Age based on unreliable found documents), there is quite some room for interpretation.
However, Chaosium is also working on an actual campaign book for RuneQuest that features many events alluded to in King of Sartar. This means removing the ambiguities and providing gamemasters with actual facts. As Jeff says:
And please people, Greg and I did develop an internal “monomyth” for King of Sartar, so we could determine which stories were false and which stories would be used in the RQ campaign. For “King of Sartar” as a literary device, we could keep all sorts of questions open, but to create something like the Great Argrath Campaign, certain questions needed to be answered so that this could be run as a game (as Greg did for Pendragon).
It’s interesting that Jeff and Greg did settle all those questions ahead of time. I half expected that King of Sartar had deliberately ambiguous material even to its authors.
The first notable thing is that heroquesting doesn’t necessarily include any re-enactment of myths (or “deity LARP’ing” as we sometimes call it). Jeff defines it as any activity during which the characters interact with the God Time on the Hero Plane. He adds:
As an aside, most heroquests are not about changing reality, or rewriting major myths – for what it is worth, I find such heroquests are not all that interesting. They are about discovering something new – in the mythology or in the characters themselves. Here’s a really basic one:
The Earth priestesses are all in a worry this year as the winter solstice has passed and the Grain Goddess has still not begun to awaken. If she does not return, there will be no spring planting, let alone a fall harvest. Everyone is worried. Omens and divinations are taken, and it seems she is trapped in the Underworld by a “Demon Lord with a Bone of Power”.
The Earth Priestess writes names of those in the local community on shards of pottery and puts them in a cauldron. She picks them out in a ceremony attended by all- it is your characters who are named! She says that you all must enter the Smoking Cave (located near the Cinder Pits) and descend deep within until you pass out of this world. She gives you an emerald crystal with two powers – it is a spell reinforcing crystal of 4 points, and it glows brighter when held in the direction of the Grain Goddess!
When I started playing in Glorantha around 2019-or-so I was wondering how heroquesting was different (or not) from “going to weird places” in other games. For instance, in Call of Cthulhu, most adventures happen on Earth, but every now and then there’s a scenario for which you need to go through a portal to R’lyeh, summon some weird beasts to fly to Carcosa, or take some drugs to enter the Dreamlands. It felt to me like heroquesting was a bit similar, only you go to the magical eternal land of gods instead. And so I didn’t really understand the point of the whole “re-enactment” stuff from older HeroWars/HeroQuest material… It sounds like I was on the right track.
Out in Western Genertela there’s this ongoing thing called “The Syndics’ Ban”, which has effectively split the land into isolated bits of reality that can’t communicate with the rest of the world. But who are the “Syndics”?
David Scott has an answer, which Jeff says “has far more truth in it than [any] previous speculation“:
The phrase appears in Wycliffe Ballads, a long piece of biographical poetry:
Quick! burn all such books and papers As might aid the Syndic’s ban, Which you find within my chambers :” Thus the hurried message ran.
I never asked Greg about this, so it amuses me to think he read this and just noted it down as a cool thing to use at some point.
The Syndic’s Ban (singular, belonging to the syndic) as it appeared in Greg’s typed notes also appears later as Syndics Ban (just plural), it appears to have lost it’s apostrophe completely in the Guide.
The syndic of the poem controlled the Sorbonne and had the king’s ear, so going back to a singular Syndic, I think it was the High priest of the God of the Silver Feet, backed by what remained of the cult. (syndic as religious controller).
The God of the Silver Feet is, of course, the deity that was slain by Prince Snodal of Loskalm and his posse of heroquesters. Given that it was the Fronelan god of communication, it, well, killed all communication in the land. Good job Prince Snodal!
Miscellaneous Notes
There were a lot of notes last week so here are a bunch I don’t have time to comment much on:
Crimson Bat Ecology: I think I missed this last week, but this includes some numbers for how many people need to be fed to the Bat! It comes up to about 100 people a week, which means the Lunars need to move the Bat around while also keeping a bunch of prisoners and criminals on hand for sacrifice.
The Conquest of Teshnos and Kralori: a Second Age document that tells the conquest of Teshnos and Kralorela by the God Learners. I tend to gloss over this kind of old lore that my players and their characters won’t really care about, but hey, there’s a cool magical amulet to control dragons, and nobody knows where it is now… soooo….
Malkionism and Sorcery: some thoughts about Malkionism, Malkioni society, Plato’s Republic, and sorcery in Lhankor Mhy’s cult, among other things.
Talastar: some population and area numbers about Talastar, the Orlanthi buffer between the Lunar Heartlands and a bunch of nasty things like the Chaos-infested lands of Dorastor. When you look at the Guide’s map, you see mostly a few Lunar cities and a whole bunch of forested area, but given the numbers I would argue that there are probably a fair number of towns with similar sizes to Herongreen and Dangerford (both of which get a dot on the Guide’s maps). This should be your reminder that you can always colour between the lines of the Guide, because the Guide leaves you a fair amount of space!
Heler: the Rain God is quite underrated when you consider how important rain is to everybody, the fact that he’s the grand-father of all Water Elementals, and the great grand-father of Malkion! Jeff gives a few reasons why he’s “of great cosmological importance, if little cult importance“.
Other Campaign Settings: some ideas for RuneQuest campaigns that don’t take place in Dragon Pass or Prax.
Kallyr Rocks: some bit of discussion from Discord about Kallyr and how she’s an interesting character because she’s flawed and controversial in the setting.
Aranwyth Tribe: a small snippet of text from the upcoming Dragon Pass Gazetteer.
Torkani Tribe: a bigger snippet of text, this time about the Torkani tribe. This also includes a clan map!
The community roundup is our highlight of interesting things being mentioned in the Glorantha-related Facebook groups, sub-Reddits, and other similar online places.
It is clear a lot of love has been put into this book, with excellent art, maps, and all you need to start playing adventures inSun County. It is no surprise it has become a Gold Best-Seller. I hope also GMs new to RuneQuest like the book enough to run a campaign in Sun County.
Disclaimer: I did a couple of illustrations and maps for these books.
Skulldixon (which we interviewed here) has written an article about Urvantan’s Tower, one of the adventures from The Smoking Ruins and Other Stories. I always appreciate Skulldixon’s reviews because he usually writes them after having actually run the adventure and therefore sprinkles the text with his personal experience, actionable advice, and cautionary anecdotes.
It became clear that I needed to change how I made notes for these game sessions because my usual note-taking method wasn’t cutting it. This one big mistake caused issues for the players and changed how the game would have played out in the end. I had to course-corrected, and everything worked out in the end.
Cette nuit, j’ai dessiné pour moi, Bon l’objectif était de créer un truc perso, et finalement c’est un Zorak Zoran de l’univers de Glorantha qui est sorti ! pic.twitter.com/JfzgUAMcFU
This small collection of illustrated parchments was found stuck between the pages of a very a couple lengthy and rather soporific books on Esrolian gardening. It looks like the scholar that was meant to copy or catalogue the books instead spent his or her time writing and drawing these bad elf-related jokes. The author is unknown.
The brown elf, the green elf, the fire elf, the white elf, the blue elf, and the yellow elf all squeeze into a very small forest clearing. They wave to the black elf and say “come on in and join us!” The black elf replies: “I don’t think you have mush-room”.
Some time later, the black elf’s brother comes to the clearing and slowly squeezes himself into the midst of the other elves. A great deal of elfish giggling ensues. Green elf says “your sister didn’t want to come on in and join us. You’re much better!” The black elf’s brother replies: “Yes, I am a fungi”.
“Never let a dad into a Glorantha forum to tell dad mushroom jokes”. That’s the morel of the story.
Of course, the author is not unknown. These jokes are by Brian Duguid (author of Children of Hykim), who nicely agreed to have them re-posted here even though, he said “but they are terrible!“. The drawings are by me (Ludovic).
Anyway, I love the internet, that’s where people can post shiitakes like these.
Welcome to a new issue of the Journal of Runic Studies, the premier Malkioni publication for studies into the nature of Glorantha. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please consult with the spirit bound to the appropriate electronic page.
Here is what us God Learners were up to this week.
Episode 15: People of Glorantha: The Tusk Riders
Episode 15 of the God Learners welcomes Dom Twist to talk about the best bad guys of Glorantha: the Tusk Riders! We discuss their publication history, what PCs and NPCs might know them, their secret origin, how to use them in your RuneQuest campaign, and more!
Cults of Glorantha + Prosopaedia Rune and Spirit Magic Spell Decks Sartar The Guide to Dragon Pass Gamemaster Sourcebook Mythic Iceland – using RQ rules but not set in Glorantha The Dragon Pass Campaign Jonstown Adventures (title may change, this is a followup to the Starter Set) Elder Race Adventurers The Upland Marsh Adventurer’s Journal The Dreaming Ruin (another adventure anthology) The Hunt for the Storm Calf (a one-off adventure based off Khan of Khans) Prax Into the Troll Realms Sun Dome Temple sourcebook Return to Snakepipe Hollow The Dragon’s Eye Big Rubble Pavis The Culbrea Tribe Elfpack Heortland & Hendrikiland HeroQuesting Nochet & Esrolia Kralorela The Siege of Whitewall “The Great Wagon Train Campaign” (title TBD)
There are at least five other books I am either not sure I can speak about, or might need to be re-assigned, but are definitely planned. I can’t give a schedule because so many things are outside my control.
The entire post was reposted on BRP Central by David Scott (thanks David!) so you can check it out and discuss it there if you’re not on Facebook. A lot of these projects had already been mentioned before, but I think this is the first time I hear about “Jonstown Adventures”, “Adventurer’s Journal”, “The Siege of Whitewall” and “The Great Wagon Train Campaign”. It’s nice to have names for the next adventure collections, too.
RuneQuest Miniatures, Rick Meints Edition
Photo by Rick Meints
Rick Meints has another “Out of the Suitcase” article on the Chaosium blog which takes a deep look at some old RuneQuest miniatures, and the small scenario booklets that sometimes came with them… Rick even generously provides high-resolution enough photos of these booklets that you can read them and run the adventures therein… thanks Rick!
RPG Writer Workshop Adventure Bundles
The Summer 2022 RPG Writer Workshop is now finished, and a few of the participants published their work on the Miskatonic Repository and the Jonstown Compendium (for Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest, respectively, of course).
Jeff Richard, the current mastermind on everything Gloranthan at Chaosium, is often posting notes and thoughts on the RuneQuest Facebook group. Here’s our curated list from the past week. A partial archive of these sources is compiled on the Well of Daliath.
A Brithini Tale
If you’re interested in immortal Malkioni sorcerers, this “Brithini tale” sort of acts as a founding myth for them.
For those who don’t know what the Brithini are, they’re basically western sorcerers who achieve immortality by clinging to super old traditions dating back to the God Time. Back then everybody was immortal and, supposedly, the One, Malkion the Creator, the Invisible God, whatever you call the original conscience of existence, was making everybody happy and logical. But, according to this tale, a mathematically dubious entity started splitting things and making things different, and things went downhill from there.
In the Gods Age all was perfect. and nothing in the world ever died. All beings were gods. Law oversaw all. Prosperity reigned in the Kingdom of Logic.
Logic demands that all beginnings have an end. What was started must be finished. From the moment of the first mathematical evolution of One into Two the end was destined to come. The division of one into Two made the Creator and Destroyer. A choice was given, and we chose the One. If alI the world had chosen One we would exist in harmony still.
Two is the Destroyer, who can make Three out of Two, Four out of Three, and Five out of Four. The Destroyer seduced half of One, and brought it to imperfection. The Destroyer inhabited half of One, and brought it to death.
Do you need to justify spending all your week-ends at home, never agreeing to parties and road trips and checking out this new brewery/pub that opened downtown? Now you can! Just say that you are honouring the ancestral traditions of the Brithini in order to achieve immortality and logical union with The One! I’m sure your friends will understand:
When Zzabur asked his father “How do we stay immortal?” the Prophet answered simply. He said. “Do not change. Do what you have done. Act within the Laws and Ways you have been given, for they are immortal. Your actions embody the One, your bodies enact the One. Anything new from this moment forward is Death.”
More here, including how the Brithini hate the Hrestoli (a Malkioni sect that favours self-care, personal journeys, and caste mobility), and how the Brithini still accept the divine monomyth as true (it’s just that they think gods are jerks, and their worshippers are suicidal fools).
Draconic Philosophy
Do you want more deep-cut Gloranthan world views? Here is a note on “Draconic Philosophy“, and is by and large the same text you’ll find in Wyrms Footnotes #14 as part of the overall “Dragon Pantheon” article, and parts of this text also ended up in the Glorantha Sourcebook’s chapter on the “Draconic Creation Myth”.
The Cosmic Egg hatched and from it came the Grand Ancestral Dragon. It sat and meditated in the Silent Void, treasuring the secrets of the universe. The halves of the eggshell were made into the servants of the Grand Ancestral Dragon and were called the Inside and the Outside.
A little bit of context: the Cosmic Egg didn’t appear from nowhere — it was somewhat hatched by the Cosmic Dragon. You may have already seen the “Ouroboros poem” which somewhat describes the creation of the universe in the draconic myths:
– : Silence, The Infinite. 0 : Zero, or an exclamation. OU : A cry of pain; Ego. OUR : Collectiveness, plurality. OURO : Collective emptiness. OUROB : Creation (Collective with an end-stop ‘b ‘). OUROBO : Closed Infinity, or Being. OUROBOR : Birth. OUROBORO : Nothing, emptiness. OUROBOROS : S = ‘Voice’ (i.e. the sound a serpent makes).
Okay so the Cosmic Dragon is often considered to be the “S” at the end of the poem. It comes out of this vague self-emergent Ouroboros thing, which is possibly just the first thought. The Cosmic Dragon then gets bored and starts doing stuff, including fighting a six-limbed no-headed monster called Orxili, which is possibly a manifestation of Chaos. Anyway, the Cosmic Dragon “set forth the Six Principles and with each recitation one of the monster’s limbs was torn off and cast into emptiness“. The Cosmic Dragon set put Orxili at the centre of the world, spun around Superman-style, and made the Cosmic Egg out of it… which, err, sort of means the Cosmic Egg was made of Chaos. Someone should tell that to the Broken Council and to Nysalor maybe?
Anyway, now you know what Jeff is talking about when he mentions the “six actions” (which are possibly acted upon based on the six principles?), or when some of Orxili’s limbs come back and fight the Great Ancestral Dragon:
The Grand Ancestral Dragon was committed to six actions which it voluntarily undertook. Each these resulted in the creation of one of the Ancestral Dragons.
[…]
Either during or shortly after this time the Grand Ancestral Dragon was assailed by powerful enemies. Some of the limbs torn from Orxili had returned. The mild waves of Disorder lapped back from the Void and the Oozing Chaos was born, returning now to thwart creation and reclaim its own to the void.
Next, the Great Ancestral Dragon performs “utuma“, the draconic ritual suicide that is still performed by Dragonewts to this day. In the case of the Great Ancestral Dragon, his blood and guts and such create a bunch of things like the ocean and the earth and so on. He has to do it because these things exists, and it’s his responsibility to create them because they are already created. Or something. It’s this whole idea of causal loops and “entanglements” that draconic mystics love so much:
This dismemberment, called utuma in dragonewt philosophy, is the result of the Grand Ancestral Dragon’s willingness to accept the duty of entanglements which his actions had brought about and resulted in his full integration into the world. By dying he re-entered the world to fulfil his duties. To have done otherwise would have resulted in a fatal weakness which would have destroyed the basis for draconic existence. This is often equated, or confused, with the dragonewt sense of “honor.”
Now the Great Ancestral Dragon’s sacrifice left a bunch of Ancestral Dragons around the world. These dragons performed mating dances, especially around Dragon Pass (which gives a whole new meaning to the term) and left behind the eggs of the True Dragons. These True Dragon you probably know well: they killed a whole bunch of people during the Dragonkill War (enough to make humans avoid Dragon Pass for several generations), and one of them just woke up in 1625 and destroyed the new Lunar temple in Sartar, ushering the new RuneQuest timeline.
Gloranthan Superheroes
Jeff has recently started showing up in the Chaosium Discord server on occasion. The following series of posts on “superheroes” in Glorantha was interesting enough to warrant inclusion here:
Think about it this way – what is Elric or Rustam? What is Cu Chulain, Arjuna, or Bhima? These are all characters that do not merely interact with the setting, but define it – the setting operates around them.
Jar-eel is the Lunar Empire. It serves her, responds to her will, glorifies her and worships her. She is the bookend of what the Red Goddess began four centuries ago. She is Civilization, Art, Sciences, and Harmony. She is the Yang of the cosmic twins. Harrek the White Bear is the response to all of that. He is the primal rage of every egg broken to make the Lunar Empire’s omelet. He is the fury of the Old Gods that she has displaced or forced to submit. He is Savagery, Brutality, Instinct, and Destruction. He is the Yin of the cosmic twins. Both are necessary in the cosmos, both are doomed to struggle with each other. Their inevitable conflict predates the gods, is tied into the Compromise, and threatens to destroy it. That’s what Gloranthan superheroes are.
Lesser heroes like Argrath, Red Emperor, Gunda, Beat-Pot, Sir Ethilrist, Cragspider, Jaldon Goldentooth or your characters – they navigate this swirling landscape, try to impose their will on it or ride it like a surfer but they are still mortals (even if they have one foot in the Hero Plane).
The Gloranthan superheroes are as deeply woven into the setting as the gods themselves. Thinking of them as mere mechanical rules constructs is always going to end up leading you astray.
The idea of the Twins is deeply woven into Glorantha. Nysalor and Arkat. Jar-eel and Harrek. Goes back to Greg’s earliest stories.
So that’s for the thematic aspect of superheroes. Here’s for the gameplay:
I might provide stats so your players interact with some manifestation of them in a particular moment, but they should not be fixed or cemented – and certainly not used to reverse engineer the setting.
So Jar-eel shows up – she attacks the players with eight attacks, which for rules purposes is 150% so I have something to roll. She has Shield 8 cast so I can ignore everything except a critical hit, and ignore most spells.
And that gives me something to mechanically interact with – but it is just a feel of the elephant. Next time it might be different.
Jeff mentions that this is his approach for several major other figures too, like the Red Emperor or the Feathered Horse Queen.
The White Moon Movement
Here is a primer on the White Moon movement which I would probably summarize as “Lunar patriot hippies”. They believe in the Red Goddess and the “Lunar way”, but they are anti-imperialists who want to spread Sedenya’s message through teaching and cultural mixing and so on.
The End of Ages
Jeff tries to put into context how each “age” in Glorantha ends in a big event, and then there’s a century or so of just picking up the pieces and rebuilding something new. Remember that Gloranthan people actually don’t know that much about events of the past unless they have the resources and time to look over a bunch of half-destroyed documents from 500 years ago or more.
Community Roundup
The community roundup is our highlight of interesting things being mentioned in the Glorantha-related Facebook groups, sub-Reddits, and other similar online places.
RPGImaginings Reviews the Weapons & Equipment Guide
RPGImaginings joins the general consensus that the Weapons & Equipment Guide (which I’m still waiting to arrive in Canada) is a lot more than what you’d think from only the title.
Roleplaying games have a long history of having weapons and equipment guides, but RuneQuest Weapons & Equipment is different […] in all the right ways.
Learn more as Michael flips through the book!
Why Heroquesting is Easier Than You Think
Andrew Logan Montgomery wrote this essay about heroquesting and everyday routines. The first part uses Vedic India mythology to illustrate the difference between the scientific or “real world” truth and the mythical, immortal truth. As often, Andrew provides us with great writing here.
Now. In the Traditional perspective, both things could be true. Here inside of Time, water condenses and rains back to Earth. But outside of Time, all this happens because Indra fought Vritra. It formed a pattern, a fact.
And let me stop you before you utter those poisonous words “that is just a myth.” You have, as a victim of the Post-Modern world, been taught that only one thing can be true. In ancient India, they were wiser. They also told a story about Indra and rain that had nothing to do with Vritra.
I’m less convinced about the second part, about everyday routines as heroquest and so on, but hey, maybe you’ll like it. More here.
Elsewhere on Arachne Solara’s Web
Not everything is about Glorantha, although most things are! Here are loosely relevant things that we found on the interwebs.
At the Museum
Photo by David Scott
David Scott started another thread on BRP Central about potential Gloranthan references found in museums… it include shamanic maps, a couple Orlanthi gods, some spirit magic foci, and more!
Folk Collective Heilung
The Guardian has a short article on the Germanic/Nordic folk collective Heilung, who specializes in “reviving” music from old civilizations, mostly iron age and older. Their latest album, released this year, includes a cover/interpretation of the oldest known complete song:
To find the oldest known complete song, you need look back just 3,400 years. Composed of lyrics, musical notation and tuning instructions for a Babylonian lyre carved into a clay tablet, it is called Hymn to Nikkal, or Hurrian Hymn No 6. Archaeologists found it in the early 1950s – alongside almost three dozen other, incomplete, Hurrian hymns – during an excavation at the Royal Palace of Ugarit in what is now northern Syria.
The video in the article is not that song, somehow. It’s this one:
Heilung of course prioritizes a certain musical aesthetic, so don’t expect this to be a “faithful” recreation of what the song sounded like originally… if that even makes any sense when it comes to music. However, you can look around YouTube for other adaptations of the original sheet music using a different approach, such as this video from the Syrian pavilion of World Expo 2020:
Ancient Bling
Cracked has an article about cool bling from the past, including Peruvian nose ornaments, crazy intricate Greek earrings, fancy Persian drinking cups, and Maya dental jewellery. This is your reminder that you can go super crazy with Gloranthan fashion, at least when it comes to the nobles and the priests.
Thank you for reading
That’s it for this week! Please contact us with any feedback, question, or news item we’ve missed!
The Weapons & Equipment Guide made its debut in hardcover at GenCon after a previous PDF release late in 2021. Dom points out that this is going to be the last publication with a PDF release before the printed product. Ludo refers to a statement of Rick Meins reported (and commented) in issue 59 of the Journal of Runic Studies.
Ludo reports on the dates for the next Chaosium Con, which will happen April 13 to 16, again in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Dom talks about his plans to go to Continuum 2023 (first time it changed to annual turnover) and Dragoncon.
We discuss the rune point cost of turning into a totemic beast.
Dom is enthusiastic about the quantity and quality of the Jonstown Compendium and the RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha releases.
The first volume of Duckpac was out at the time of recording, but by now there are already three of the announced four volumes available.
Chaosium interview with Jeff Richard on game balance.
Main Topic (“It is boaring”)
Ludo presents Dom as the person referred to us as an expert on these guys.
We assume that listeners have at least the RuneQuest rulebook and Bestiary, but Ludo does a 20 seconds presentation of the Tusk Riders
Public Knowledge
What would the average Gloranthan know about the Tusk Riders?
Jörg points out the chance of the adventurers parents having participated in the Boar Hunt of 1606, and Ludo mentions the one of 1622 that adventurers could have participated in themselves.
Dom states that in the eyes of the average Gloranthan of the region, the Tusk Riders are evil: they raid, not just for food and loot, they also want to capture and torture people for their magic.
Dom explains that each Tusk Rider is paired with one of these giant Tusker boars, pretty clever beasts totally dedicated to their riders.
Dom compares them to Sir Ethilrist’s Black Horse cavalry.
The Tusk Riders are heavy cavalry who move unimpeded through forests
We talk about gaining the alliance of a large number of Tusk Riders by sacrificing an entire unit of militia as sacrifices to the Bloody Tusk.
Jörg points out that they breed like pigs, too, replenishing their numbers within very few years.
Ludo talks about what happens to their captives, whose spirits remain enslaved after being tortured to death. We speculate how much of the details of this are known to their foes, and how much of the in-world lore about the Tusk Riders is factual and how much is hear-say or superstition.
We agree that the Tusk Riders are bad to the bone, and thus an excellent foe or boogeyman to throw at adventurers, whether in person or whether just as rumours.
Publication History
Ludo brings up their exonym “Orcs on Porks”, at least among roleplayers.
Dom reminisces about orcs in RuneQuest and other systems.
Jörg boars with the publication history, beginning with RuneQuest 1st edition which already had stats for most of the creatures mentioned in White Bear and Red Moon/Dragon Pass and Nomad Gods.
In White Bear & Red Moon (WBRM) they already had that alliance requirement of sacrificing a unit of soldiers, and a couple of other traits later realized in their expanded descriptions.
Ludo points out that there were Tusk Riders that could be hired as mercenaries or used as adversaries in Snake Pipe Hollow, one of the early scenarios for RuneQuest.
Dom mentions the Judges Guild RuneQuest scenario Broken Tree Inn, located near Snake Pipe Hollow and thus near the Stinking Forest, which features them too.
The Tusk Riders get a fuller description in 1981’s Borderlands campaign, with a full page on their culture and history, and as antagonists in one of the seven scenarios.
Dom relates his recent experiences encountering Tusk Riders as opponents for a player character of his, in the Borderlands campaign, pointing out the enmity between his Daka Fal shaman and all the Tusk Riders stand for.
Jörg points out that the text passages in the earlier publications often were re-used verbatim in later publications (WBRM; Wyrm’s Footnotes 3 in the Guide to Glorantha, the NPCs of Borderlands in HeroQuest’s Pavis: Gateway to Adventure, RQ3 Elder Secrets in the RQG Bestiary), which on one hand is nice that the newer material contains most of the information the older publications had, but limits the actual amount of text written on the Tusk Riders.
Ludo speculates about why the Ivory Plinth poem gets recycled again and again (Wyrm’s Footnotes #3, Wyrm’s Footprints (the “Best of Wyrm’s Footnotes” by Reaching Moon Megacorp, under an Issaries license, mostly with material that went into the Sourcebook), the Guide to rGlorantha, and the RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha Bestiary). Jörg muses that the poem makes fleeting mention of so many places and events that were never explained that this is the only way to preserve them. Dom points out that the poem was created by Greg Stafford, and that Greg himself was not a stickler for remaining absolutely true to what he produced years ago, unlike some other contemporary brand.
Troll Pak riffs on the half-troll connection and introduces their role in the troll civil war during the Inhuman occupation.
King of Sartar expands on that conflict, and The Smoking Ruins scenario book further expands on this.
Coming into Glorantha with the current RuneQuest rules, already the first scenario in the GM Screen pack features them.
Dom points out that the presence of Tusk Riders cannot be ignored by responsible leaders or problem solvers, as they are certainly going to come and take captives and plunder, if they haven’t already done so and you need to free their victims, or at least release their spirits.
Theory Crafting and Fake History
Ludo leads into this by pointing out that we don’t know the canonical situation, and that the Tusk Riders themselves when talking about their past are known as liars making impossible boasts.
Dom mentions the human hero Aram-ya-Udram, a human hero who boumd a Darkness Spirit to him. After the Dark Night Ermaöda sent the God-Pig Gouger to exact vengeance for improper worship or even blasphemy.
Here’s a work-in-progress picture of Aram by Loic Muzy for the Cults of Glorantha book:
Dom speculates that already Aram heroquested to turn his people into the half-trolls and worshippers of the Darkness demon.
Dom teases a follow-up scenario for Defending Apple Lane while talking about Red-Eye, the divine /demon pig residing in or around Pig Hollow in the Colymar Wilds.
Ludo spoilers Defending Apple Lane (but you’ll have to listen to the podcast to hear this)
Jörg protests that Dom is maligning good old Aram-ya-Udram, who was after all the human representative on the World Council of Friends in the first century after the Dawn, and a civilized man.
Ludo offers a (in his words) half-assed theory about the Aramites, Tusker-riding humans living in the region of what would become the Ivory Plinth, an ancient ziggurat temple in the Stinking Forest (then still known as the Tallseed Forest).
Then some people disrespected the Earth, becoming complacent stopping proper worship of Ernalda, getting punished by sending Gouger to take revenge. Aram tricks Gouger, using his Darkness Demon, slays the God Pig and sets up his tusks at the Ivory Plinth.
Ludo theorizes that Aram’s people lost their agriculture, becoming hunter-gatherers and mercenaries riding the Tusker boars that could be tamed thanks to Aram’s feat slaying Gouger.
Later, during the EWF, the human Tusk Riders approached some Mad Scientist working in the EWF to make them more powerful
Ludo riffs on the Tusk Rider claim that once upon a time they had 12 kings each ruling their kingdom, and suggests that the experimentators had 12 experimental specimen of Aramite stock who somehow escaped the experimentators, taking bloody revenge (to loan from the Akira anime/manga) and starting the half-troll Tusk Riders we know today.
We digress shortly on the Remakers – Ludo suggests gene-splicing, Joerg advocates classical stitch-up chimeras like Frankenstein’s Monster or Doctor Moreau’s Island.
Ludo points out that according to one source, the Darkness spirt bound by Aram and used to slay Gouger disappeared into a void of Chaos, and that bringing back that spirit as their God of the Bloody Tusk may have corrupted them.
Dom thinks that that corruption has more of a Chaos feel and points out that there is a know Void of Chaos right on the edge of the Stinking Forest, below Snake Pipe Hollow. Dom points out that we know for a fact that in the EWF there were these experiments which resulted in the Beastmen, but thtat there were other ways the Beastmen came to be, and with the heroquesting going on in those times everything could be true to some extent, or made to tbe true.
Ludo wants his players to stumble on an old experimental complex of the EWF experimentators, with numbered holding cells destroyed, apparently from within, and gruesome victims of that escape fossilized in some way or written records made by the experimentators.
Jörg points out that the list of Dawn Survival Sites in the Guide (or History of the Heortling Peoples) also mentions a Tusker-riding nobility among the Harandings at Marlothenyi, in northern Esrolia.
Those Harandings feature in the original Lawstaff Quest (first presented in King of Sartar and used as a scenario in the Orlmarth campaign in HeoQuest’s Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes), where their king Harand Boardick pawns a son to his troll ally Jago Zaramzil to gain their support in his attack on Arrowtop Mountain.
They also lived right next to the Entruli of Maniria and Slontos, descendants of the Pig Mother, and possibly the people Harand’s mother came from.
Jeff put up some stuff on the Well of Daliath that indicates that Aram was helping Lalmor of the Vathmai (an Entruli clan or tribe living in or near Esrolia) bring the Lightbringer Ways to the Entruli.
The Entruli king had done some rather unspeakable things which caused his city to sink below the Mournsea, and some other cities to be destroyed. Jörg speculates that this was the transgression against Ernalda which caused Gouger to rampage against those cities, continuing to destroy human habitations as the God Pig moved east into Esrolia and beyond into Dragon Pass. Jörg speculates that Aram’s companions hunting down the God Pig might have been a warband of Haranding nobles who followed the pig all the way to the Stinking Forest, and then settling down there without any gardeners of farmers, making a living as mercenaries, hunters and gatherers.
The timetable is a bit messed up, but that isn’t that unusual in Gloranthan history.
A literal reading of the Dawn Sites documents suggests that Gougers tusks were already in place at the Dawn, which means that Aram slaying the God Pig would have happened in the Silver Age, or even earlier. But then, Ernalda went to sleep some time around the arrival of the Chaos Horde to fool Nontraya and his hordes of the Dead and didn’t really have the means to send an avenging pig or complaining of not receiving the correct worship until after the Dawn.
Jorg boaringly goes on to list the named leaders of the boar riders throughout history.
There was the leader of the center of the Orlanthi contingent at the Battle of Night And Day, Old Swine Dezar, leading 150 Tusker-riding warriors into the battle.
There was the Great Living Hero of the EWF in the Machine Wars, Varnakol the Mangler, a boar rider who had tusks and two named axes, whose enemies preferred death by his axes to being captured by him.
And finally there was Karastrand Half Troll, “leader of the boar-riding trolls of the Rockwood Mountains”, during the Troll Civil War in the Inhuman Occupation. Karastand claimed imperial human ancestry-
Jörg has the wild theory that the son given up by Harand Boardick in the Lawstaff Saga got adopted and reborn as a troll and fathered a lineage of boar-rider trolls in the Rockwood Mountains, and that that lineage and the (already EWF-modified) Aramites around the Ivory Plinth crossbred, making that half-troll ancestry true at least for this leader and his siblings, possibly as an adoption ritual similar tto that Pain Centaur spiel that Ironhoof used to adopt the Pure Horse Folk survivors of the Battle of Alavan Argay to found the Grazeland pony breeders.
Ludo wonders how this could be brought into a game (where Jörg assumed that any Sage worth their ink and/or facial hair would happily collect such information).
Making Games More Boaring
Next we start talking about using Tusk Riders in games.
Dom suggests that the Tusk Rider ritual to turn captives into one of their kind is not limited to humans but that it also works on trolls.
Jörg mentions the thread on BRP Central on Tusk Rider adoption. Dom points out the Tusk Rider adoption story-line in the xomputer/mobile game King of Dragon Pass, and using that in your own campaign.
Dom quips that they are sort of the Hells Angels of Gloranha, coming to beat people up, take their stuff, riding hogs.
The BRP Central thread had a suggestion that someone might quest to return the Tusk Riders to their less unpleasant human form, although we wonder who would go for that trouble.
Dom poins out the Sons of Anarchy TV show which is about a criminal biker gang, and how that could be used for some Tusk Rider plots, and that the Tusk Riders should be intelligent and clever opponents.
As they have low charisma, the leaders of a warband will lead by intimidating their followers, and by providing results.
Ludo points out how the Tusk Rider antagonists get decent tactics, acting intelligently. Dom suggests that they wish to harvest the most magical of their opponents, and that they lure them into their kind of territory by abducting dependents.
Dom points out how binding enemies’ spirits creates a magic economy for the Tusk Riders that forees them to capture other people to become powerful, which they need to survive in Tusk Rider gangs, especially as leaders. All that stolen magic makes them strong and unpredictable magical foes.
Dom describes how hit and run tactics may be used to make their opponents cast expensive spells, only to sit those out until they expire, and then hit again. They have the magic of their bound spirits in severed hands or tails to power their spells, and may use their Tusker as an allied spirit, too.
For capturing foes, they may use lassos or similar, then dragging their victims through the forests which cannot be healthy.
Ludo asks about how to stage the hit-and-run using RQG rules (like e.g. the chase rules), or whether to handwave (which is how Dom prefers to run such things, more narratively). Dom points out how the Tusk Riders are vulnerable to missile fire when doing that, as their major tactical flaw.
Ludo describes how he had the characters of his “we all play children” campaign happen on the site of a Tusk Rider massacre, and then catch up with exhausted Tusk Rider survivors of that combat, playing them dumb to match the abilities of the underage characters.
Dom describes how he ran a sequel to Defending Apple Lane where the sister of the leader of the first attack (who lost quite a few minions, and leadership) comes not so much to take vengeance but to harvest those interesting magics of the player heroes, preparing ambushes and traps for luring them into pursuit after capturing some dependents in the hamlet.
Ludo explores where Tusk Riders typically set up their bases.
Dom suggests that a Thane of Apple Lane who successfully dealt with Tusk Riders and possibly Red-eye multiple times may become a status target for ambitious Tusk Rider leaders or wannabes.
Speaking of typical boons earned by player characters Im the official adventures, Jörg asks how Dom would handle a conflict between hippogriff-riding heroes and Tusk Riders. “Into the woods” would be the Tusk Rider reaction to such opponents.
Dom goes on to describe the Stinking Forest as a war zone where Tusk Riders, trolls, elves, dwarfs and giant spiders may slug it out, allowing any playee heroes to experience crossfire situations.
Ludo talks about how there might be secret shrines to the Cult of the Bloody Tusk very close to area deemed safe by the player heroes, with pilgrimages bringing victims there. Jörg suggests to use the Broken Tower as a possible holy site for Tusk Riders, sparing the GM a lot of prep time.
Ludo talks about somewhat “friendlier” Tusk Rider neighbors that will take ransom payments, or engage in clandestine trading, which Dom brings back to the plot hooks that can be lifted from Sons of Anarchy.
Dom mentions the problems that might arise when a party healer (possibly the NPC follower) gets taken by Tusk Riders. Do you want to face Tusk Riders with powerful healing magic, or the Sleep spell? Tusk Riders are one of the few non-chaotic Gloranthan foes who would have no qualms killing Chalana Arroy healers.
Jörg brings up the possibility of using the Tusk Riders as a playable race. We talk about how to play characters who are bound to torture people to keep up magically, and how this needs buy-in by the players, and careful off-screen handling of the unpleasantness.
Dom mentions the scenario that a gang of Tusk Riders who may have plagued you the past few seasons offering their services as mercenaries
Dom spiced up his Tusk Rider threat by having them carry newly minted Lunar Tarshite coins, to trigger player character paranoia. Dom expands how an able Lunar commander might send out a special operations team (effectively a player character party managed by the GM) to stir up feuds and banditry in the rebelling province of Sartar, with Tusk Riders a good choice to spread terror and distraction.
As time runs out, Jörg thinks that we have boared people enough, and Ludo hopes we made people loathe / love them as much as we do.
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